I’ve tried to make a habit of remembering kindness ever since 1993, when a very kind OB/GYN delivered medication to my mother’s apartment, where my boyfriend and I were sleeping on the floor.

I was almost nine months pregnant. My kidneys had stopped cooperating. I had lost twenty-eight pounds. My hair was falling out.

His name was Richard Irion.

I still check in from time to time, the way some people check on old houses, old songs, old weather reports from the years that nearly took them. Not because he would remember me. Not because the moment was grand to anyone else. But because kindness, when it arrives at the exact second you think the world has forgotten you, becomes part of the architecture.

You remember the people who did not step over you.

My grandpa was a general surgeon. When I was small, I remember hearing his stories — not only of what he saw, but of what he smelled. The textures he refused to eat, no matter how beautiful the bowl. Mushrooms, for example.

As a child, I did not understand all of it. I only understood that the body left traces. That some people spent their lives walking toward what the rest of us looked away from. That healers, even the practical ones, even the funny ones, even the ones who came home and sat at the dinner table, carried rooms inside them that other people never had to enter.

Maybe that is why I remember kindness from doctors differently. Not as a transaction. Not as bedside manner. But as something chosen by someone who has seen what bodies can do, what pain can reduce us to, what fear can make of a room — and still chooses gentleness.

That kind of mercy has weight.

It stays.

So when you looked through the speculum on Friday, you had no way of knowing the world I had carried into that room.

You saw anatomy. A cervix. A uterus. A procedure that needed to be done.

But I brought every room with me.

And before I could explain any of that, there was Astrid, the training nurse, calling me Katie, as if even my name had become one more thing I had to keep from slipping away. And then you became the calm that helped me walk through Friday’s storm.

The floor of my mother’s apartment. The almost-baby inside me. The failing kidneys. The hair in my hands. The doctor who came anyway. My grandfather’s stories. The smells he could never forget.

The mushrooms he would not eat. The knowledge that bodies are never only bodies.

They are histories with skin.

You had no way of knowing what the womb you were asked to “break into” meant to me.

That it had held my only baby.

That the maker of that baby would go on to have a stroke, and later succumb to suicide.

That the baby and I would have to survive while I found a way to earn a bachelor’s degree, and later, an MBA.

That we would have roommates, and rooms with no furniture. That we would live in places where everything felt temporary except the need to keep going.

And somehow, we came out of it okay.

Not untouched. Not unafraid. Not without ghosts gathering in the corners.

But okay.

So maybe to you, the womb is another organ. A structure. A site. A place to sample, measure, rule out, diagnose.

But to me, it is the place that held the love that carried me through this life.

It is where my son began.

It is where my survival began speaking in a language I did not yet know how to understand.

I know you could not have known.

But I hope, somehow, you know now.