Warning: There is some pretty graphic description in this blog so if you are squeamish this episode is not for you:
After returning to California I chose to locate in Los Angeles, where I had a number of friends, associations I made during my previous residence in Lancaster. I found a great cheap 1 bedroom apartment over a garage in the Crenshaw area, where my friends lived.
In 6 months my Army boyfriend got out of the Army and he wanted me to meet him in Chicago. Apparently he was wondering if he had done the right thing by breaking up with me. We spent a weekend together but our relationship did not gel and after I flew back to LA we never had any contact again.
The Los Angeles County Health Dept. was happy to hire any nurse with public health experience in the Army and I started to work immediately at the San Pedro office of the Health Dept. Driving on the Harbor Freeway every day (is it still there?) was a new grueling experience and after one year i was happy to be transferred to Huntington Park. My professional experience with the LA Health Dept was mostly with Spanish-speaking families—nutrition, immunizations, and following up other communicable disease including tuberculosis which was common among people from Mexico at that time. My skin test for Tbc converted from negative to positive during that time. This only means I was around someone ( and probably many people) who had active tuberculosis but I never had the disease myself. My social life was very active and I participated in one of first dating services in the US, organized by UCLA—this was 1965-6!
During this time I became pregnant. Birth control methods were iffy and birth control pills were in existence then but not commonly used. My boyfriend was an ok guy but not someone I wanted to have a lasting relationship with. Besides, he was married (separated). I went to an OB-GYN Dr. but of course this was before Roe v. Wade and abortions were still illegal, even in California. The Dr. contemplated doing an abortion procedure on me but changed his mind as he could get have gotten in a lot of professional trouble. So I pressed my boyfriend to find someone who would do an illegal abortion. Just an aside: it never entered my mind to carry the pregnancy to term…having a baby at that time in my life was definitely not in my consciousness. I always planned to get married and have children but this was not in my radar. A quack doctor was located and I insisted my boyfriend pay for half the price which was $200 cash. ( He wasn’t going to help pay for it because he said it was my fault that I got pregnant!!) I made the appt. and I was scared when I drove alone to this dark apartment in a part of town I was not familiar with. The procedure the Quack used was to insert a rubber urinary catheter through the vagina and through the cervix ( pain pain pain) into the uterus. I want home alone and after several hours my uterus rejected the foreign object (the catheter) and I began to bleed. The uterine contents was expelled but I was still bleeding so I called my OB Dr. and he immediately admitted me to the small local hospital, did a D&C surgery procedure to stop the bleeding and gave me a round of antibiotics to prevent any infection from the quack abortion procedure. I recovered from the whole episode without any problem but to this day I tell as many people as I can that legal abortions must remain available. I was fortunate because I was a nurse and knew what to expect and contacted a real doctor quickly. It was not safe because the quack could have killed me. Women will be die if we do not continue having legal abortions. There are always women who do not wish to procreate and who will have abortions and there are unscrupulous people who will do botched abortions and kill women who are desperate.
