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"I couldn't be why you wouldn't get to have your children. It was one of the only things you'd been sure of in the last two or three years of our lives. You wanted to win, and then you wanted to find someone you could have kids with. And I already knew then that I likely couldn't ever physically give that to you." She swallows hard again and gives him her best smile as she blinks away the tears. "I left the studio without talking to you or anyone. I took a different exit and texted you to say I'd see you on Sunday. You took the hint. I let myself feel it all that night, probably more than I've let myself feel anything. And then in the morning I put all those feelings and potential and confusion back into the box and put it away."
"But you weren't in love with me?"
"No," she admits. "I never let myself go there before that day, other than a brief moment when I was sixteen and lonely, and you went through a very protective phase. Even then, it wasn't romantic love so much as the shock of being seen and comforted when it felt like no one in the world was willing to see me. But other than that, I didn't let myself go there before that day at the studio, and I didn't let myself go there after that day. I only had time to acknowledge the potential, really acknowledge it for the first time ever really, and then to know that I wasn't for you." Her voice cracks when she says Dustin, and I can feel his chest split open in response to her pain.
"I'm so sorry," he tells her.
"For what?"
"That you had to go through that night alone, for starters," he tells her. That night and any other nights like it. And for so much more.
The silence stretches out in front of them, and Dustin is content to let it be for a few moments, but there are still things he's missing. He can tell, and since Colleen is opening up, he decides to push for a little more.
"What, exactly, was wrong? Why couldn't you have children?" He leaves off with me. They'll return to that at some point, but for now, he wants to know her struggle. He's known since she was a teenager that she's had "female trouble." Her periods were painful, though he didn't get great at noticing it until after when she either started letting him see when she was in pain or when he finally realized that he needed to be paying closer attention. It had been about her legs back then, but her tells were similar, whether it was her legs or something internal. He thought the surgery had fixed it, though.
"I had a combination of issues, including endometriosis and fibroids."
Dustin nods when she pauses to see if he remembers. It all sounds familiar, though he wouldn't have been able to name either condition an hour ago.
"I sucked it up until the beginning when I had that surgery to get rid of some of the extra tissue that was causing the pain. That was the doctor that told me I probably wouldn't have kids easily because of the way the tissues were growing on the ovaries and fallopian tubes. At that point in my life having kids wasn't something I was remotely considering so I heard his warning as less, 'you'll have a hard time having kids' and more of a 'you shouldn't or won't have biological children.' And I was okay with that."
"And that's when drunk me thought it'd be a great idea to get gushy about hypothetical babies, which gave you the impression I'd only want kids if they looked like me?" Colleen nods and rolls her eyes with a grimace. They were terrible at communicating during that period of their lives. Dustin continues, "I remember the surgery, though. It was a fairly quick one, right? You recovered in a few weeks?"
"Yeah. And it worked for awhile. I felt so much better until right after Dance Internationals. The symptoms started coming back and they ramped up until they were back in full force by the end of our first tour after the Championships. Then I moved abroad with Brett and I spent the next three years throwing all the hormones and other treatments at my conditions that I couldn't risk while we were competing. None of it helped. Then they did another fertility work up and it turned out that in addition to some really stubborn and frankly horrific endometriosis, I really was infertile and what few eggs I had were trash."
Dustin raises his eyebrows at her strong description.
"I still don't understand how I could spend so much of my life training my body and taking care of it as best I could, and so many different parts of that same body were so broken." She says it like she's joking, but he can hear how betrayed she still feels - he doesn't even blame her slightly. He holds her hand tightly as she continues, "Even with all that pain and basic dysfunction, it still took me a year of work to convince a doctor here to do a damn hysterectomy. They were so concerned that I'd regret not having a womb, even though my eggs were old and useless and I was in constant pain. The thought of carrying a child, one that would have to come from another woman's egg and, what? Brett's sperm? It wasn't even remotely something that seemed appealing. I finally found a doctor in Hilsburr that looked at my history as a whole, looked at the misery I'd been in, and was willing to schedule the hysterectomy within a month. In the end, they removed it all, uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries too, since they needed to get all the endometrial tissue, and for some reason, my uterine lining enjoyed getting friendly with my ovaries and fallopian tubes."
"Oh, Colleen," Dustin breathed out, completely overwhelmed by how jacked up she'd been physical without him having any real clue.
"I didn't have a chance to think about the consequences. I didn't care if the hormone issues might prematurely age me or make certain parts of my life more difficult if HRT didn't work. I, for once in my life, didn't want to hurt anymore. The thought of going through decades of more pain hoping someone would care enough about the issue to come up with legitimate treatments or a cure was just unfathomable." She exhales, gives him the saddest, most self-deprecating smile, and adds, "But I might have been a little hasty."
"No, Colleen. You made the right choice. Of course you did."
"I did, but I made it very quickly, even though in the grand scheme of things it wasn't quick at all. I didn't give Brett any time to prepare, and that ended up being a mess, but I didn't give myself time to prepare, either. I also didn't take the time to recover, really. I shut down, flew back as soon as I was able to, and got back to work as soon as possible once it was done. Physically I recovered quickly and the HRT is working extremely well for me, but mentally, I didn't give myself time to grieve - didn't really understand I would need to. I thought because I was fine without kids that it wouldn't matter to me that they had to take my womb."
"Did you at least get into therapy again?" Dustin asks.
"Not until I came home for good," she admits. "My family tried. I guess they could tell I was spiraling from the minute I scheduled the surgery. I sobbed when I held Jane for the first time. I just completely broke down in a way I never had in front of the boys and terrified them. I made an offhand comment about Cody's wife uterus being in perfect working order, I apologized to my mom for being a bad daughter and not being able to give her a grandchild, made a lot of other off color jokes that I find a little horrifying now looking back. Belinda begged me to see a therapist in the month that I was home before the surgery but I insisted I was fine because I was making the right decision. And I was. I just didn't know how to grieve. I didn't know it was okay to."
"And then Brett..." Dustin prompts the reality of how the ending of that relationship would have felt for her dawning on him and making him want to kill the dude.
"Like I've said before, I thought we were on the same page about what kind of partners we would be for each other and that parenting partners would never be in the mix. That changed for him. Something about me being incapable of conceiving and giving birth made him realized that he actually did want kids. He wasn't cruel about it, but I'd be lying if the timing didn't make me feel...like I was less of a woman somehow. That without my uterus, I became something less than I was before."
"Colleen," Dustin starts but honestly has no clue what to say.
"Anyway, we hung on for a few more months, but once I got the charity proposal from Cynthia, I knew that would be it. He didn't argue." She sounds so tired and defeated.
Dustin does the only thing he can think to do and pulls her into his arms and holds onto her as tight as he can, hoping that it will ease the heaviness that the last few years have left her with.
She hasn't been crying, but as he holds her, her fast, almost erratic breathing slows and evens out, and she tucks herself into his embrace and holds him just as tightly.
Colleen is the strongest person he knows, with the highest pain tolerance of anyone he's ever met. The amount of pain she must have been in to push for such a drastic surgery is astronomical to him. That anyone refused her that relief makes him angry than he can express. The complexity of what she has said - and what she hasn't - will take some time for him to parse out, but the one thing he knows for sure is that she is more than remarkable, and nothing she's told him changes that.
Colleen sighs heavily against him, and he can sense she's out of words. His mind is a storm of conflicting thoughts and emotions, all swirling around and bouncing off each other. Sorrow, guilt, and anger all try to find purchase within him, and he believes that each will have its day, but for now, as he holds onto her, tight as anything, it's awe and respect that win out.
It's only a few minutes before her breath evens out too much, and she relaxes enough in his hold that he knows she's fallen asleep. He is tempted to let her sleep on him throughout the night but decides against it, knowing that they both need better rest than huddling together on a couch can afford them. Then he debates shifting so he can scoop her up and take her to her room in the vain hope that she'd sleep through it, but something also keeps him from that option.
