Wish I didn't know how much of this stuff is rooted in truth. Painful to write. really.
It hadn't started well. That was one. If Charlotte thought it wouldn't end there, she probably wouldn't have bothered to start counting at all.
It started long before she started to think she needed to go see Addison for a pregnancy. Long before she was excited because she knew why she wanted to go see Addison- in hopes she'd lose the pregnancy. It was the pain to start with, that had started years ago, the lingering physical reminders of a brutal rape.
The stabbing pain, that nearly knocked the wind out of her. She knew there was likely deep scar tissue, possibly vascular adhesions attached to her ovaries, or attaching her ovaries to her uterus, or other areas they were not to be. Charlotte King wasn't stupid, but she knew that getting a pelvic exam done after that sick bastard raped her was going to be the last time anyone put a speculum in her. She didn't plan on letting another doctor get a look-see in there for medical reasons unless her vagina were actually, literally, on fire.
Addison's post-rape exam had been worse than the rape; hence Charlotte was more than reluctant to repeat something that traumatic. She knew she was supposed to do a follow-up pelvic, but couldn't bear it. She knew she certainly needed to after she'd resumed having sex with Cooper, or when she'd first tried to. turns out she did indeed have a lot of internal scar tissue, evidenced not only by the pain, but by her bleeding like a stuck pig. Horrified by both that and Cooper's unintended act of hurting her, Charlotte had taken matters into her own hands (as opposed to going through yet another traumatizing pelvic exam), going as far as she could with the equipment at hand. She wanted Cooper to think she was fine and 'over it'. Couldn't do that if he physically couldn't have sex with her.
It was difficult to cause herself so much pain. She stuffed a handtowel in her mouth to muffle her screams as she used a dilator to push through the scar tissue. Some bits had knitted themselves together, making her impenatrable. She kept at it, until her thighs and hands were covered in blood, and until the tool could penetrate fully. She was shaking from the pain, and the effort of continuing to hurt herself, in the midst of flash-back after flash-back.
As much as Charlotte hoped this was all, she knew as well as any doctor that scar tissue can travel. It was entirely possible for adhesions to have formed on her uterus, and even her ovaries. But, she didn't want to think about that. Not because it would make her sterile, that would be a plus. It was because scar tissue attached to the uterus or ovaries was notorious for causing random horrible, imobilizing pain at the most inconvenient of times.
When the pregnancy resulted in the same horrid pains, Charlotte was thrown right back there. And so when she'd skipped off to see Addison for the removal of her IUD and hopeful subsequent miscarriage she was more looking forward to ending her pregnancy than she was worried about the procedure or the pelvic itself. In fact she didn't give Addison giving her a pelvic a second thought until she was gowned and in the stirrups.