I don’t remember a time without Pelvic Pain.
I was 14 when I started menstruating and they were never normal periods. I knew that. I knew because my mother never told me to prepare every month for the soul crushing symptoms that come about. She barely knew she was on her period every month. Barely needed a pad. I, on the other hand, felt it coming like a boulder moving through my abdomen and landing in my uterus. When my period would arrive, it was like a pause in time, like I had just been shot and I could see my life flashing before my eyes. Clots, bleeding through my sheets, cramps that were intolerable.
As I got older and birth control helped to regulate my cycle, I learned to cope. I learned to bear down when the pain would hit, breathe through the wave, focus on a spot on the wall, and just crush it. I learned to line my underwear with extra long overnight pads since tampons were much too painful. I learned how to attend parties and outings and just pretend the pain wasn’t killing me. Why? Because nobody really understood how painful it was. It wasn’t like in the movies where you see women pushing in agony to have a child. This type of pain - pelvic and period pain - was not (and still is not) ‘out there’ yet. Over 20 years of holding my head high, and I’m still educating others on how this truly feels, month over month.
I chose not to have a child. I was told I had stage three endometriosis and while I’m sure I could have done the fertility treatments I didn’t feel my body could handle it. Sure, I may have gotten pregnant and had a baby, but having a child and raising a child are two very different things. Raising a child would mean being there, being present, and putting them first. My body just wouldn’t allow me to do that in the utmost capacity that I would want to.
I was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2012 (a 15 year journey to get a diagnosis) and had an ablation at the time. I experienced - for three whole blissful months - what it was like to not have pelvic pain. My goodness!. My body was out of the fog. I slept better. I moved better. But ablations only cauterize the disease so it all grew back and I was back to square one again. In 2017, I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis. This would help explain so many of the bowel symptoms I had developed over the last decade. The urgency to poop. The paralyzing pain during bowel movements. The triggering from certain foods. But don’t get me wrong, I had no idea I had anything wrong with my bowels; I always thought it was a part of endometriosis. Let alone, having an autoimmune disease that would attack my own body. I once got myself into trouble. I was riding home on the bus, and my bowels started gurgling. I wasn’t surprised, I was on my period after all. But it donned on me quickly that I needed a bathroom and there were absolutely none around me. I got off the bus at my stop,... waited for the bus to pass,... and pooped in the bushes. At that point, when you basically poop yourself in broad daylight, there is no going back. You crawl out of the bushes, straighten yourself up, and walk home. My body was in sweats from the pain, and the fog of it all masked any amount of shame I had. Dignity? I didn’t care at that point.
These episodes of needing to poop urgently, or bleeding through my pants at school, were just things I endured and never spoke about. That’s the thing with dealing with symptoms that aren’t highly understood - you just don’t talk about it. And when you don’t talk about it, you swallow it. And when you swallow it, you somehow become powerful and almighty, wearing a smile on your face while your insides are being ripped apart by ninja’s with knives. My husband gets to see it all, unfortunately for him. He held my hand while my IUD was inserted; perhaps to this day the worst pain I have ever experienced, second to when they unclogged my left fallopian tube with ‘champagne’. He sees the rises and falls of every cramp, every bowel movement, every ugly cry. And part of me wishes I could shield that from him. Selfishly though, I think to myself, ‘this is one more person in the world you will truly understand pelvic pain’.