Helvegr

I’ve been doing a lot of podcast appearances lately, and often, I get a response after we are done recording, “You know, Melissa, you seem so intelligent and so personable, I don’t get how you were in a cult, even after interviewing you.” Public perceptions around cult members aside, I think when I tell the story of what my life is like, it’s so easy to talk about the swath of manipulation, both by Lux, the leader, and the other girls.

But I rarely talk about what kept me in, the things I still to this day struggle with making sense of. What kept me in doesn’t make for entertaining listening, or a cautionary tale you listen to on your commute and then get to pat yourself on the back about because something like that hasn’t happened to you. People want the redemption arc.

So I don’t say how Lux also saved my life.

I have been childfree since I was born, basically. When other girls played with baby dolls, I loved playing pretend, taking on other characters, and living vicariously through them. I remember seeing teachers from my daycare when I was in middle school, and they reminisced that when other girls wanted to be mommies, I went straight to the flashiest red dress in their dress-up closet. I then wore it to pretend to go grocery shopping.

I have been on one form of contraception or another since before I even began having sex, and often doubled up on methods because I was that petrified of even having an oopsie baby. At gynecologist’s offices, I would often come up against this idea of a future baby, or being a future mother.

Absolutely the fuck not.

So I did research, and I advocated for myself. I approached my gynecologist about getting an IUD when I lived in New York. And then, when the pandemic was raging, and I was afraid that Roe v Wade would be overturned, I started looking into something permanent. I was already married to the Hobbit, who, after four hours as a caretaker for a 3- and 5-year-old, knew he sure as shit didn’t want to be a parent.

Did my new gynecologist in Connecticut still ask me what my husband thought when I told him I wanted my tubes removed? Yes. Did he still schedule me for surgery ten days after I told him I wanted my tubes yeeted? Also yes.

Bilateral salpingectomy, the technical term for when the tubes that connect your ovaries to your uterus get removed, is a pretty easy procedure. They do it laparoscopically, and I went in in the morning, and was discharged before 2 pm (the Monday after Father's Day, which both me and the Hobbit found hysterical).

When I got home, I was like “I had surgery, so I deserve a nap.” I went to bed, but woke up in a metric fuckton of pain. I am not a complainer, and have a pretty high pain tolerance, but I knew that this couldn’t be right. Chris called the gynecologist’s office, which put in a prescription for oxycodone and Chris picked it up. It made little to no difference. Then I couldn’t eat anything. Then I spiked a small fever, like 100. I knew on the discharge paperwork if you have any fever they say to go to the ER. I mentioned how shitty I felt, that I had just had surgery, and that I couldn’t eat anything.

They discharged me. They said it would get better over time.

It didn’t. I ended up going two weeks without eating anything that wasn’t Tylenol. Lux had a policy that because she freed up that time for you, you were financially liable, regardless of whether or not you showed up, so after two weeks of only getting worse and missing her previous session, I just showed up because I paid for it anyway, and no refunds. I couldn’t do any of the training, and I felt like literal trash. “I just don’t know what to do, Lux. They tell me it’s temporary and that I’m going to get better, but it’s been two weeks, and I’ve only gotten worse.”

“Would you like me to pull some runes about it?”

She told me that I was never going to get better without help from my community. Whatever was going on, I couldn’t do it alone.

I thanked her for the reading and then fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, it felt like I was being hit by a baseball bat every time I took a breath. I heard from Lux that I needed my community, so I up and went to the ER again. The same ER that told me two weeks prior that it was going to get better. At triage, they gave me an EKG. The EKG tech reviewed the results, checked them again, performed another EKG, and then left the room. I was taken to get blood drawn and then shown to a room. Everything was repeating itself the exact same way as my last visit, with the exception of the EKG tech’s response.

After getting little information, going for a CT scan, and then waiting hours for nothing, at 1 a.m., I told the Hobbit I was done and just wanted to go home. I was prepared to just leave against medical advice because I just didn’t want to waste any more time.

A nurse came in as I was getting ready to leave, and asked me what I was doing. I told her how I didn’t want to waste the whole night there. She immediately got one of the doctors.

“So you want to leave AMA?”

“Yes.”

“I would highly caution against doing that.”

“Why? I feel like shit, and it’s been the same thing as last time.”

“Well, you have multiple clots in your lungs, any of which could go to your heart and give you a heart attack, or go to your brain and give you a stroke, or the clots alone could kill you. You also have an abscess that wasn’t on the CT two weeks ago, which is now 10 cm in diameter, and we’re afraid it’s going to burst. We currently have a team of 15 doctors meeting to discuss your case, including your gynecologist who performed your surgery. We are waiting for a bed to admit you into our cardiac care unit.”

“Oh.”

Once I got admitted, I was provided with way more information. The clots in my lungs, often called a pulmonary embolism, are something that has killed a number of people. And I had multiple clots. It only takes one to kill you. They were so afraid of a stroke or heart attack that I had to have sensors on me at all times, and I couldn’t take a shower, only a sponge bath. My gynecologist almost cancelled his family’s trip to Disney because he was freaking out. They wanted to perform surgery to fix the abscess, but couldn’t because of the clots, so there was a lot of discussion about how they were going to drain it and what was in it.

None of that would have happened if I hadn’t heard the message, “You need help from your community.” I shudder to think where I would even be today without that message.

So, almost two years later, when Lux is using the $ 90-per-hour session to tell me she wants a fragrance called Helvegr that smells like roses and a funeral, I did it.