A Brief but Bold Encounter Leaves a Whole Life Shaken
“We’re going to be doing a meditation for the empowerment of women,” the nice young woman said. “Would you care to join us?”
No, sorry, I hadn’t come to the Whole Life Expo, a New Age industrial fair in San Francisco recently, to meditate. I had come desperately seeking Vicki.
The theme of the expo was “Renew Your Sense of Wonder,” and I certainly was renewing mine as I wound my way among the crystal hawkers, aura readers, trance channelers, brain-tape vendors, raw sauerkraut sous chefs, healing essence sales reps and customized pyramid builders.
How many pinheads on the head of a pin?
There must have been a million stories there in naked gullibility city, but I wanted to know Vicki’s. Vicki was to speak at the expo on “Dream Walking and Empowering Women.”
Vicki would be Vicki Hufnagel MD, described as “the creator of female reconstructive surgery” and the author of “No More Hysterectomies.” Vicki? A creator and an author?
I don’t know why that should have surprised me. I remembered Vicki from 17 years ago, when she and I were members of the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective. She was firmly entrenched in my mind as a wild woman. Even in our group of angry young women, Vicki stood out.
In those days, we walked around in T-shirts emblazoned with a female symbol that turned into a fist bearing the message “TAKE CONTROL.” Since then, Our Bodies, Our Selves had evolved into Our Careers, Our Selves. Many in the group had become doctors and nurses heading AIDS programs, running industrial medicine clinics and training other doctors and nurses at universities.
It really wasn’t surprising that Vicki, one of the most aggressive of the group, would end up a surgeon. It was either that or be burned at the stake.
“She was charismaticly crazy,” was the way another friend recalled her. But what specifically crazy things Vicki had done, I could not remember . . . except that she was the first person I knew who wore bowling shirts to medical school.
Vicki was wearing an attractive black dress as she spoke to the group at the expo. She was always a beauty, but she had to have had more than good looks to become chief resident at Albert Einstein Hospital in New York.
“I’m here with you now, but I’m also back in the caves,” she began lecturing. “We gave birth in the caves, and men fled the caves in terror. We as women give up our power--we have it taken with our organs.”
And that is why Vicki has become a militant Friend of the Uterus. She pointed out that of the 673,000 hysterectomies performed annually in the United States, only 10% are done for cancer--almost the only justification for the surgery, according to Vicki.
For that reason, she has become a reconstructive surgeon. She doesn’t do nose jobs or tummy tucks or liposuction. She reconstructs women’s internal organs to save them. Vicki feels that, when dealing with the uterus, male gynecologists have been too eager to “yank ‘em.”
“What do men know about blood,” she continued, “. . . except from war and killing?”
When she is not operating or lobbying for stronger informed-consent laws, Vicki, now 39, is a mild-mannered housewife in Brentwood. She is also the mother of Tara, a 2-year-old who follows her mother around exerting her own awesome, tiny female power.
After the lecture--a strange mixture of science talk and goddess talk--I went back to the expo floor, where I found the booth for Vicki’s Institute for Reproductive Health. There, a monitor showed a videotape of the good doctor performing surgery. This was going on right next to the eating area, where a group of women sat munching on organic strawberries.
Vicki, perhaps reflecting the video orientation of her Los Angeles clientele, tapes all her surgeries for a post-op show for the patient. She also encourages family members to watch the surgery on closed-circuit monitors. Now everyone can see Mama’s tubes on the tube.
As I stood at the expo, gazing at the brave New Age that has such people in it, a child handed me a flyer, “Meet the Next President of the United States: Raphael Ornstein MD, running under the banner of the Human Ecology Party.” Then a man and woman invited me to attend their “Incredible Couples” workshop, where I could learn to express my anger without words.
Beam me out, Scotty--it was time to leave. I knew that Vicki had learned to express her anger and that she’d had a baby. I like happy endings.