When an ultrasound finally confirmed the source of the pain days later - two tumors next to the fetus - it was too late: Cottom went into preterm labor and her daughter died, “shortly after her first breath.” Her doctors and nurses (at a hospital in the “white, wealthy” part of town) dismissed both symptoms, “explained that I was probably just too fat” and sent her home. She was 30 and four months pregnant when her “ass started hurting, the right side,” accompanied by copious bleeding. In the essay “Dying to Be Competent” in her 2019 collection, “Thick,” Tressie McMillan Cottom recounts a harrowing medical crisis that began with a literal pain in her butt.
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