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intheheartTitle: Scars
Rating: PG
Summary: She is diagnosed in the fall of her twenty-ninth year.
Date: Fall 2002
Notes: none
WARNING for discussion of infertility.
She is diagnosed in the fall of her twenty-ninth year. It will be over a year before she can look at a baby without flinching.
--
All her life, she has been in pain. It began when she first bled. She remembers doubling over in gym class, weeping with pain, remembers having to go home and lie down with a heating pad. She did not notice the spots of blood in her underwear until she took them off that night.
She remembers she thought it was normal.
It wasn't until college, when she nearly failed a class because of two-days-a-month absences, that she found out it wasn't.
Her mother told her to grit her teeth and bear it. Her doctors gave her painkillers and sent her on her way. Not normal pain, then, but lots of women hurt, and some must hurt as much as this, for didn't she? She was an outlier, but it was still natural.
She took her painkillers and gritted her teeth, and made it through work and school and work again, weeks and months and years. The pain became background, constant; every day she bled, she ached. She accepted it.
Then, shortly after she turned twenty-nine, the pain did not stop with the blood.
It was subtle, creeping. It lasted for perhaps an extra day, at first. Then two days. Then a week. Then she could not stand up without pain in her abdomen and her friends were worried, asking why didn't she go to the doctor, for heaven's sake, it could be cancer.
It is not cancer. It is almost worse.
Endometriosis, the doctor told her, with solemn eyes. He could not be sure without surgery, but he thought stage three, maybe stage four. She has had it, he said, all her life. He could treat it, with surgery. Her pain would stop.
The surgery confirmed it, all of it, and one thing more, that she cannot even think.
--
She is not so sick, anymore. The pain is gone, and it is a relief beyond words, so much she wants to weep. She tells her friends of the diagnosis and the treatment, but does not tell them the results; that the scarring was too much, that if it comes back she will likely lose her uterus. She does not tell them this because she knows they cannot handle it. She can, but only barely.
She tells her family nothing. She keeps remembering her mother, and the painkillers, and the doctor saying that if only it hadn't got this bad, if only there wasn't the scarring...
She is too numb, these days, to feel.
Rating: PG
Summary: She is diagnosed in the fall of her twenty-ninth year.
Date: Fall 2002
Notes: none
WARNING for discussion of infertility.
She is diagnosed in the fall of her twenty-ninth year. It will be over a year before she can look at a baby without flinching.
--
All her life, she has been in pain. It began when she first bled. She remembers doubling over in gym class, weeping with pain, remembers having to go home and lie down with a heating pad. She did not notice the spots of blood in her underwear until she took them off that night.
She remembers she thought it was normal.
It wasn't until college, when she nearly failed a class because of two-days-a-month absences, that she found out it wasn't.
Her mother told her to grit her teeth and bear it. Her doctors gave her painkillers and sent her on her way. Not normal pain, then, but lots of women hurt, and some must hurt as much as this, for didn't she? She was an outlier, but it was still natural.
She took her painkillers and gritted her teeth, and made it through work and school and work again, weeks and months and years. The pain became background, constant; every day she bled, she ached. She accepted it.
Then, shortly after she turned twenty-nine, the pain did not stop with the blood.
It was subtle, creeping. It lasted for perhaps an extra day, at first. Then two days. Then a week. Then she could not stand up without pain in her abdomen and her friends were worried, asking why didn't she go to the doctor, for heaven's sake, it could be cancer.
It is not cancer. It is almost worse.
Endometriosis, the doctor told her, with solemn eyes. He could not be sure without surgery, but he thought stage three, maybe stage four. She has had it, he said, all her life. He could treat it, with surgery. Her pain would stop.
The surgery confirmed it, all of it, and one thing more, that she cannot even think.
--
She is not so sick, anymore. The pain is gone, and it is a relief beyond words, so much she wants to weep. She tells her friends of the diagnosis and the treatment, but does not tell them the results; that the scarring was too much, that if it comes back she will likely lose her uterus. She does not tell them this because she knows they cannot handle it. She can, but only barely.
She tells her family nothing. She keeps remembering her mother, and the painkillers, and the doctor saying that if only it hadn't got this bad, if only there wasn't the scarring...
She is too numb, these days, to feel.
