Vagina Read Online Free Page B

orgasm, it is by now, in our liberated moment, surely, somehow, their own fault: they must be too inhibited; too unskilled; not “open” enough about their bodies.
    Dr. Cole tactfully cleared his throat. He courteously sought to turn my attention back to my own predicament.
     
    Dr. Cole referred me to Dr. Ramesh Babu, a neurosurgeon at New York Hospital, and that, too, was a very lucky thing. Irrationally, perhaps, I was immediately reassured to find that Dr. Babu, a suavely dressed and charismatic physician from India, had on his shelves among his neuroscience texts the same small statue of Kwan Yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, that I had at home on my own bookshelves. Dr. Babu offered me an apple and then hectored me firmly but kindly on the need to operate without delay. Scarily, he wanted to put a fourteen-inch metal plate, with a set of attached metal joints, into my lower back, and fuse the damaged vertebrae. Fortunately, his will was just as strong as mine.
    I scheduled the surgery. After a four-hour operation, I awoke, hideously groggy, in a hospital bed, the owner of this metal plate contraption, which fastened the vertebrae of my lower back together with four bolts. I had a vertical scar down my back that my boyfriend—in an effort to reassure me—described, referring to the punk rock band, as “very Nine-Inch Nails.” All these changes seemed like very minor issues compared with the hope I now had of regaining the lost aspects of my mind and of my creative life, via my now-decompressed pelvic nerve.
    After three months I was allowed to make love again. I felt better but not completely recovered; I knew that neural regeneration, if it were to happen, could take many months. I continued to recuperate steadily for six months, eager but also scared to find out what would happen, if anything, to my mind once my pelvic nerve was really free of obstruction again. Would the nerve fully recover? And, more important—would my mind fully recover? Would I feel again that emotional joy, sense again that union among all things?
    Thanks to Dr. Babu and perhaps to whoever in the cosmos may have taken my call, I had a complete neural recovery, which was not something any of the team had taken for granted. This particular kind of neural compression, though not unheard of, is seldom written about outside of medical journals, and I am a walking control group for the study of the effect of impulses from the pelvic nerve on the female brain. Because of how scant information is on this subject, I feel I owe it to women to put down on paper what happened next.
    As my lost pelvic sensation slowly returned, my lost states of consciousness also returned. Slowly but steadily, as internal sensation reawakened, and as the “blended” clitoral/vaginal kind of orgasms that I had been more used to, returned to me, sex became emotional for me again. Sexual recovery for me was like that transition in The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy goes from black-and-white Kansas to colorful, magical Oz. Slowly, after orgasm, I once again saw light flowing into the world around me. I began to have, once again, a wave of sociability pass over me after lovemaking—to want to talk and laugh. Gradually, I reexperienced the sense of deep emotional union, of postcoital creative euphoria, of joy with one’s self and with one’s lover, of confidence and volubility and the sense that all was well in some existential way, that I thought I had lost forever.
    I began again, after lovemaking, to experience the sense of heightened interconnectedness, which the Romantic poets and painters called “the Sublime”: that sense of a spiritual dimension that unites all things—hints of a sense of all things shivering with light. That, to my immense happiness, returned. It was enough for me to have glimpses of it once again from time to time.
    I remember being again in the small upstairs bedroom of the little cottage upstate; my partner and I had just made love.