For two months I bled inside my body without knowing it. Something was tearing me open slowly from within and I could not name it.

At the time I was a struggling dancer with no money, car insurance, or doctor.

Every night, at almost exactly at midnight, the pain came.

It started as a tightening, then a burning, then twisting so sharp I could not stand upright. I would fall to the floor and crawl on my hands and knees across the room, gasping for air, the sweat pouring off my face. Nausea took over and dry heaves shook my body.

I remember pressing my forehead to the carpet and praying.

Please God…
Did I do something wrong? I’m not a bad person. Please help me.

My ex-boyfriend’s mother, a veteran nurse, a born-again Christian believed prayer would solve all problems. Her voice echoed in my mind– just pray God will take care of you–cast your fears to Jesus.

So, while inside my body was tearing itself apart, another pain grew inside me — the belief that this agony was somehow my fault. What did I do wrong? I was unchristian, unchaste, a heathen.

The cramps tightened like a vise around my abdomen. My insides felt as they were being twisted by invisible hands. I would crawl to the toilet and vomit shaking, the room spinning. Unbeknown to me I had and ectopic pregnancy, and the embryo had lodged in the fallopian tube. When the tube burst, blood began slowly leaking into my abdomen.

For weeks it pooled, burned and rotted inside me. Night after night I lay on the cold bathroom floor whispering prayers, begging forgiveness for sins I had not even committed. I did not know that something inside me was dying while it poisoned my body. I only knew the pain.

And then morning would come.

The pain would recede as mysteriously as it arrived, leaving me weak and hollow. I would wash my face, put on my dance clothes, and go teach my classes as if nothing had happened. My students saw a smiling instructor. No one saw the woman who had spent the night crawling across the floor begging God to stop hurting her.

I remember the Vietnamese neighbor running across the street and cried, green your skin green, you need doctor. So I went to the Free Clinic and told them I was bleeding for two months, my breasts were swollen, perhaps I was having an ectopic.

The nurse said,
If you had an ectopic you would not be able to walk in here.

The test proved negative for pregnancy–doctor attributed it to stress. I went home and continued praying.

My father was the one who saved me. At Hollywood Presbyterian they gave me a 24 hour test and said come back in the morning. Apparently, they tried to get a hold of me but couldn’t, my answering service wasn’t working. On arrival they rushed me in for a sonogram.

Ectopic they shouted. Let’s get her on the operating table.

I had to get blood massive transfusions because I lost so much blood. Just one more hour and I would have been dead.

I didn’t understand what was going on.

All I could say was, I want the baby. I want the baby.

The nurse cried out to me. There ain’t no baby anymore.

Tears burned down my face.

I could see my father shaking, sobbing with my pain.

I didn’t die. But later learned the poisonous nature of rotten blood scarred my fallopian tubes and parts of my lower intestines. I was left barren.

The physical pain was close to deadly. But the emotional pain took many years to heal. My mother disowned me. How could I have gotten pregnant? It’s my fault. I was a bad woman.

My one big goal in life was to be a mother. I always loved children. I taught children’s dance then and most of my life. The ugly truth that I couldn’t have my own was unbearable.

I felt worthless–no sane man would want a barren woman. All my dreams and hopes vanished.

Ten years of physical abuse. Mental abuse. Emotional abuse. By men who took advantage of my vulnerability. Trying to adopt a baby seemed virtually impossible. No social worker would let me adopt because the abusive man I married , the social worker didn’t trust. I had two operations to open the remaining tube — but they failed.

I’m seventy-eight years now. Once in a while, a glimmer of what it would be like to be a mother, to develop a child inside my womb, to see it grow. Maybe I would have been a cruel mother like my mother was to me. But maybe I would have been a wonderful mother, because I know how it hurts when your mother treats you cruelly. Maybe I would have been an over protective mother watching every step my child takes.

Today as I sit here writing this story, I am looking out my front window watching the same woman I see everyday jogging around the block. It’s 6:00 AM, a March wind is blowing.
Her body has changed over the months. The muscles in her arms and legs are taking shape and she has lost weight.

Lying below me are my two dogs. My little boys I call them. One is 4 years old and the other 20. I am fiercely protective of them. And beside me is a kind and loving man, my husband, an elder like me, married for thirty-seven years.

For many years, I believed that loss meant I was something less. But life has a way of changing its shape.

The house is quiet. The wind moves through the trees. And at last, I understand something I could not know when I was young:

Survival is its own form of motherhood.

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Genie Nakano, Summer 2026