An Apology to My Younger Self
You have a chronic pain illness. You have had it since your first period at 14, sitting in the second row of a youth group van on the way to a Point of Grace concert, and there it was, the rusty brown blood of your very first period.
It’s the only period you ever had that you don’t remember the pain that came with it.
Your chronic pain, it’s endometriosis. Surgery will give you a 1–3 year window where you are not in pain that nearly makes you vomit. If you hadn’t been determined to learn to belch like the boys as a kid, you probably would vomit. But you worked out your diaphragm, so it’s strong enough to hold back the bile.
It is endometriosis. The spongy, expandable tissue that you shed once a month while you bleed because you are biologically a woman — it sends out tiny spiders to weave webs of excess tissue and purple, oozing pustules.
There is no reason for it, nothing you’ve done, just a genetic code that has led to your grandmother, your mother, both your aunts, and your sister having hysterectomies at various ages. The only reason you have survived with all your bits to the ripe age of 32 (so far beating your sister by a year) is that you saw a pattern in them and decided to finally seek help.
I wish. I wish. I wish. I wish I’d sought help before the age of 30. I wish I had fought back when doctors told me the pain that dropped me to the floor was just what some women went through. I wish I’d trusted myself more, pushed the doctors more, pushed myself more to ask questions and make reasonable demands and gotten better care at an earlier age.
I am 32 now, and I have surgery in two months. We’re calling it a tubal for insurance reasons (and it’s a tubal I’m glad to have, as you know), but the doctor is booking extra time to burn the spider webs and pustules off our reproductive organs, and until then I’m on pain meds because I can barely get out of bed some days. I’m on day one and it’s changed everything, but I could have been on them a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, and avoided the very worst of the pain that blurred my vision. The only reason I didn’t pass out was the pure stubbornness you know well.
I’m sorry, my younger self, that it’s taken this long to finally take the best care of myself I can. I’m sorry my sex ed was so shitty I assumed my cramps — my falling down, blurring vision, yelling out without meaning to cramps — were just cramps and not a sign things were worse.
I’m sorry, younger self, that I fell into the idea that doctors are authority figures and I shouldn’t push back. I’m sorry I let multiple doctors tell me it just was what it was and didn’t list the things I knew that made it different. The level of cramping, the length of the cramps, the fatigue, the mood swings, the occasional fevers, the amped anxiety.
I’m sorry, younger self, that I read up on endometriosis again and again and talked myself out of it because that couldn’t be happening to me. That couldn’t be my issue. A three-generation family history of getting female reproductive organs yanked because of a sudden explosion of pain and infection couldn’t possibly be a sign that maybe, just maybe, my pain meant more than just a monthly hell on the full moon. A werewolf transformation held still by being too tired and sore to finish the job.
I’m sorry, younger self. I wish I could have done better, trusted my instincts better. But Google Chrome keeps giving me a squiggly red line under endometriosis, and so I hope you can understand how this happened, how we got here — me at 32, just finally learning how to control a chronic pain condition that’s been riding on my back for the last seventeen years.
I hope and hope and hope that we both wake up from surgery and know things are getting better.
