I suffer from endometriosis since age fifteen.

Don’t pity me, I didn’t even know what that was three years ago. I just knew that a couple of days per month, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, that I would be weak and tired, and that I felt like I was about to die, basically.

One time, I was so in bad shape that my mother brought me to a hospital: they thought I was doing an appendicitis and they opened me up straight away, without even waiting for the tests results. Turns out, I wasn’t having an appendicitis. I had something but they didn’t know what… I had endometriosis already, but I didn’t know it yet.

I hated OB gyn. The first time I went, at 16 years old, she hurt me so bad that I wasn’t able to walk properly for the rest of the day. The second time, she didn’t believe me when I told her I was a virgin (I was eighteen). When I tried another one, she called me a liar for when I said that I had only one sexual partner (guess what, not every girl is a slut!). That last one called me a “sissy”.

My period lasted between three and five days, and I was sick the first two days: nausea, headaches, stomach pains, dizziness, even dysuria. I suffered from ache in my own vagina 20 days per month. I could say exactly in how long I was supposed to have my period because I could feel it. 

The first time I tried to have sex, it hurt so bad that I bursted into tears immediately. I could try again only two years later, with a more patient partner, who understood that something went wrong (patience was apparently his one and only virtue, otherwise he was the biggest dick I have ever met in my whole life). I fainted once during sex, a long time ago. I still can’t truly understand why people are so into it. Even if it gets better with time, after five minutes or so, it starts to hurt so much that I pray for it to stop.

I finally found, after ten years, an OB Gyn, a very gentle and kind lady who put me into a special pill, a whole month pill, which means I can’t have my period at all. Sometimes I do, because the endo is still here, it’s just slower than before. The last time I got it, I felt dizzy, weak and like in a roller coaster. That reminded me that it was still here, inside me.

Recently, I complained about people asking me when I was having a baby. The truth is when you have endometriosis, you don’t know if you will be able to, at all. Every year, during my annual OB Gyn appointment, I am asking if it’s going to be possible and invariably, the doctor tells me it will be. I want a baby, at some point. Not now, for various obvious reason, but endometriosis is surely an element to consider.

I am not gonna die from endometriosis. I am stage one, which is pretty basic, I have my pill for a month, I never stop it and it’s okay. One of my former colleagues had to be put on early menopause because the whole month pill wasn’t working on her. The endometrium is so infiltrate that she has to go into surgery once a year. I am far from it.

I had a flower tattooed on my appendicitis scar they performed on Christmas Eve in 2009. It wasn’t that far away, but they didn’t do a sonogram to check what they were doing. And every time someone is asking me when I’ll have a baby, I respond that I want a dog anyway. Because it’s better to fight it by ignoring it, by living anyway than to explain every boring day that something is happening inside of you.