UPDATED:  April 29, 2007 10:15 PM
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Hla Ohn Mae, Burmese Dissident

By: K.M. Kaung

Standing about 4 feet in height, weighing 90 pounds, Hla Ohn Mae (not her real name) is a Burmese dissident, now a citizen of New Zealand. She fled from the Burmese military junta through the southeastern jungles to Thailand, after the junta’s unrelenting crackdown on the Burmese pro-democracy demonstrators in September 1988. She has a creamy pale complexion, long eyelashes and jet black hair. When she smiles, a pair of dimples adds more brightness to her face.

I first met Hla Ohn Mae in 2002 at a Burma conference, and have kept in touch with her since. In August 2005, she emailed me to say she had just had a hysterectomy. Shortly after that, I met several women who had been subjected to what I would call “forced hysterectomies.” I was struck by how young these women were, and how many I have met. Hla Ohn Mae agreed to be interviewed by email.

She said she had not been forced into it by anyone, that it was an informed decision on her part. She had been having pap smears every year, but only an ultra sound could have detected the fibroids that she had inside as well as outside her womb. “But who would think of having an ultra sound just for white discharge and itchy discomfort?” she asked.

“This caused a lot of pain in my marriage as I was being an 80% Buddhist nun,” (that is, celibate). “When I had (intercourse) it was painful. My doctor in New Zealand did blood and other tests. She looked nervous when she told me I had multiple fibroids…When she acted like that, I cried like a baby.”

She recalled: “I know what full hysterectomy is, but I still got on the web and read what I searched. My friends found me a Thai doctor, but as usual being Thai plus Asian and seeing too many fibroids, she suggested a full hysterectomy. She wasn’t pushy. She explained that having a full hysterectomy would also impact my sex life. What many of us have in our mind is there is a little narrower space in us and that’s where our sensation gets full satisfaction. Since I was more than a nun, I wasn’t thinking about that much. All I was thinking was Pain, Pain, Pain. I had to go (empty my bladder) frequently. Those fibroids were pressing my bladder and every 5-10 minutes I had to go.”

“My doc told me she could operate each one out but would have to leave some small ones and there would be multiple scars. Rupture is possible: The linings of the womb are too much like the vine and root of a tree.”

Hla Ohn Mae had told me in her very first email that she made the decision to have a complete hysterectomy 5-10 minutes before the actual operation. She said: “In the two months that I waited for my operation, I was in a ‘love me, love me not’ mood. I was pretty sure about not wanting to be a mother, but my gosh, here we come! Thoughts about motherhood, embracing, rearing my own flesh and blood, imagining holding my own daughter. I always had a bias for a baby girl.

“My boss was also annoying me. He disclosed my health problem to my colleagues without telling me. He used it to block me from working at the central office where pay and benefits were better. I was angry and frustrated, but I knew the decision was mine. In our marriage, I make all the major decisions so it came naturally to me.”

Hla Ohn Mae told me she felt the Thai hospital was not as thorough or modern as the one in New Zealand where she had had a gall bladder operation, but it was “all right.” The nurses did not know enough English but as she understood Thai, it was okay.

She had the hysterectomy and it was not like the keyhole surgery taking out five little black stones from her gall bladder. This time, “there was enormous pain, as if my whole body was on fire, specially from the waist down. It was pain like hell.”

She told me she had little pre- or post operation support or counseling, but it was okay. “Lots of friends came to visit and give me lots of love. My ex-boss came to see me. He has a four-year-old named Janey Girl. The family gave me a card with JG on it smiling with little balloons. All the nurses asked me, Is that my daughter? I hated him even more. I just lost my womb and people are asking, Is this my daughter?”

She told me as a young girl she was “a bit of a tomboy” and liked to hang out with the boys drinking bitter coffee and watching football matches. She was educated in a monastery in the eastern coastal region of Burma and her parents were not very educated. They were traders and small business people. Her mother was with other relatives and not at home when she reached puberty and had her first menstruation.

She said her father applied ointment when her “left breast started to swell. I don’t think he realized what it was.” After she fled with other university students to Thailand, her father followed her via the Myawaddy overland route to their student camp at Mae Sot, and then went back to Burma, dying in August of 1989. She was in a Thai jail for some time with other Burmese refugee students, for immigration related matters.

She said her marital life was much better, due to the disappearance of the pain, after the hysterectomy. She told me she feels a more fulfilled woman now. “Wombless Hla Ohn Mae or Hla Ohn Mae with womb, it’s still me!” She told me triumphantly.

I was so glad that this was a victorious survivor I was talking to, not another victim.

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