Occasionally, during my training, when one of our staff physician teachers removed a uterus that looked perfectly normal, we'd jokingly call the diagnosis CPU, a medicalized acronym for "chronic persistent uterus."
              - Dr. Christiane Northrup, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

Smiling an insider's smile,
my mother's friend, an M.D.
at the National Institutes of Health
in Bethesda, near Washington, D.C.,
reached into a metal tray and handed to me
what looked like a gray ball.
I cradled it in both hands, amazed to see
such thick strong muscle, more like a heart
than the passive empty triangle
in biology textbook diagrams.
I was startled, as when I first saw
Leonardo's drawing of a child
curled up inside the womb.
He'd gotten it right:
a muscular fortress
guards the unborn life.
The womb I held
was small and dead, cut out,
but it still seemed powerful -
tight, as though tense,
yet velvety to touch.
Meanwhile the woman doctor checked
tissue samples under the microscope,
slowly dictating into tape
her pathology reports.
Against the fluorescent buzz,
her voice had a routine,
emotionless rise and fall:
normal, normal, normal.
I was seventeen; I hadn't heard
about hysterectomies until then.
Where I came from no one seemed to have them.
But here everything
was supposed to be more advanced.
I watched, still stunned
to have held a womb in my hands.
"What happens to these later?"
- "They are burned
in the incinerator."
A technician entered, rolling in
a tiered metal cart
filled with a hundred more cut-out wombs.