Searching for my organs

Lately I’ve been having trouble understanding where my organs are.

So — sometimes I wonder: where is my uterus?

Onto google image I go. But this only adds to the confusion. See e.g. the image below: so the uterus at 15 weeks pregnant (so where I’m at right now) is sitting on the right side, kind of where you have your handbag (or a gun holster)?

She’s packing a baby!!!

Other images show the uterus and then a void before the belly ends. What is in the void? Intestines? Air? Skin? (Also the images teach me that all pregnant ladies and their babies are the peach-colour of an elegant 1980s living room).

All pregnant ladies are the peach-colour of an elegant 1980s living room with soft furnishings (and their babies too)

How come they can make images that show incomprehensible stuff (to me) like black holes or how nervecells work but basic female anatomy is impossible to visualise?

Then there is the fruit.

Though fruit is a highly ambiguous unit system, even more unreliable than the mediaeval-y body-part measuring system (“may I have two elbow-lengths of yarn, wench?”) it is highly popular on pregnant lady sites. It’s unclear whether, when the baby is as big as a blueberry, we are talking tiny, pea-sized forest-blueberry or terrifyingly inflated GMO blueberry.

Are you a natural blueberry or a corporate one?

But the confusion does not end here. Because websites even disagree what kind of fruit-level we are at each week. Here I am, happy as a clam, that my app tells me “my baby is as large as a big orange” (not just any orange, but a big one! That’s practically like a small grapefruit! Or a shrivelled mango!)

But no.. a full week later, another website tells me: “your baby is as big as a lemon!”

Why is it “baby” and not “the baby”? I think removing “the” makes it less clinical and more endearing — but I’m just too bitter about the lemon to be endeared.

Like that’s supposed to make me happy?

A week spent tearfully cooing to nets of juicing oranges in the supermarket and it turns out we’re only at lemon-level (when life gives you lemons, make them GMO so they’re as big as organic oranges).

So I am left to stare at the mysterious — non-peach-coloured— expanse of my stomach, trying to guess where everything is, with the knowledge level of my elbow-measuring mediaeval ancestors.

The miracle of life is truly mysterious. Especially when it comes to my organs.