'What Do You Mean, It Jammed': A Harrowing Journey to IUD City

By Jia Tolentino - Jezebel
January 8, 2015

“On Monday evening at about 5:20 I was wearing a cream-colored sweater and nothing else, lying back on a medical table with my feet in stirrups, breathing like my 80-pound dog when she's having a stress dream. Between my legs was a young and pretty OB/GYN with a short blonde ponytail and an air of capable kindness. She called me "dear" repeatedly and explained every step of what she was doing—this is the speculum, this is the numbing agent, this is the antiseptic, now you're going to feel a device that straightens out your cervix, now I'm measuring your uterus.

Everything was as chill as could be, but the opposite. It is an unnatural state just to be Donald Ducking in a winter sweater, let alone doing it under fluorescent light while a nice woman aims a foot-long applicator straight at your cervix, a body part you'd previously thought of as a sort of Doomsday Gate, set to open only in states of emergency. What was happening was painful; I felt pushed out from the inside. "Now I'm putting the IUD in," she said, and I breathed, dog-like, with one hand over my eyes.

I heard the OB say "Hmm." Then, "Uh-oh." Her head popped up between my knees.

"The device jammed," she said. "It didn't work."

"What do you mean, it jammed," I said. I was embarrassed because I thought that my cervix had rejected the IUD like a bad magnet. I could tell I was about to cry.”