Letters on it make such a strange word you wonder if they haven’t spelt it wrong. Endometriosis. It seems latin. You read the sentence under it and realize bewildered that you might not be crazy.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
Endosomething
You cry. You cry because it hurts and your head is burning and you want to pass out. You cry because you don’t understand and everyone is looking at you and they think you’re crazy. You think you’re crazy. Or is it the same. You force yourself to smile and you stand straight and pretend like shooting pains aren’t going up and down your legs. Your mother asks if something’s wrong and you tell her ‘girl problems’. She must know. She has them too. You look around the room and see how uncomfortable the men become. One of them is as red as a tomato and you imagine you should be ashamed. This isn’t the first time. You spend your adolescence hiding your face and your pain from everyone you know and anyone you meet. People think you like being alone and you start thinking you do too. You’ve stopped telling people how much you hurt because it has become too much, too often. How can you be bad all the time. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and scream into your pillow because you don’t want to disturb your parents. You’ve already had appendicitis too many times in your life for it to be real now. So you wait until it disappears and you can finally stop crying. It leaves. But not for long. In the morning it will be back and you’ll have to pretend and hide all over again. On occasion, you would tell your mother how terrible you are and feel and she would take you to the doctor. You’re stressed, he’d say. Do you eat enough yogurts. So you would go home and buy crèmes brulées and hope the pain would go away. But nothing worked. So you blame yourself for your own unhappiness and for weighing on your family like that because you’re anxious and that’s why your body becomes painful and that’s why you’re sad. You go see another doctor and another and you end up at a hypnosis session. A nice woman asks you to let go of all your childhood trauma and you have no clue what she’s talking about but you nod politely. You leave her office feeling worse than when you came in. Suddenly you’re already sixteen and everything seems to degenerate and your mom is worried now. She takes you to the gynecologist for the first time and explains everything to the man in white and nothing seems to be wrong. You swallow back your pain and smile. Your mom is relieved. You feel despair creeping under your skin. You go back to school and try making friends while hiding your pain and your tears. It only ever works for a while. You wonder how you could make yourself seem happier when talking to other kids. They seem to be managing so well. You talk to another girl one afternoon and she tells you how much her periods hurt and how annoyed she is at her own body. That girl smiles all the time. You barely manage anymore and you think every woman feels your pain and you’re just being a wimp. One day however, you walk into the girl’s bathroom at your highschool and you see a small poster which changes your life. Letters on it make such a strange word you wonder if they haven’t spelt it wrong. Endometriosis. It seems latin. You read the sentence under it and realize bewildered that you might not be crazy. You extend your painful arm and touch the poster. It doesn’t feel reel. You have seen too many doctors for a poster to teach you anything. Nevertheless you rush to the gynecologist and tell him you think you might have that endosomehting or other. He says no. You ask him how he knows and will he do the tests and he says too many girls have been coming to his office thinking they have the disease. It’s a trend. Go home.
You do.
A year later, you’re attending your grandmother’s birthday and you’re gasping on the bathroom floor and you think you’ll die. The pain is too strong and your body has suffered too much and you only hope for it to end. Your mother sees you and realizes something is truly wrong. Should she call an ambulance she asks. You end up taking an advil. A few months later you’re finally getting an MRI and you close your eyes and pray for an answer while you lie still. The doctor says to come out of the machine and smiles at you kindly and asks if you want to grab your mom who came with you. You can see it in her eyes. Your mother arrives and she sits next to you with the most intense look on her face. She holds your hand as if to comfort you but all you can think about is how you need to pee. She doesn’t understand. This is the happiest moment of your life. When you leave the building she seems in shock and keeps on muttering to herself ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it’. You came to get diagnosed. She calls your dad and you look around and breathe for the first time in years. You’re not crazy.
You start taking your treatment and go back to university with a big smile on your face. The bleeding stops and the pain diminishes and you think you’ve finally won the war. But you’re falling. You can’t seem to stop crying and you’ve lost all happiness in you and is this normal. Thousands of women experience depression symptoms from the pill your doctor says. You’re given a different treatment and you try to lose yourself in work and distract yourself from your own hormones. You think for a while that you can battle the chemical reactions happening inside you but it becomes obvious you can’t and you’re back to no pill and pain and pain and pain. You crawl home and ask for help and you’re back at the doctor’s office and please give me a treatment that doesn’t make me lose my mind. I’ve prescribed you another pill. You try standing tall and remember why you take this medicine but it’s so hard when your entire world is so dark. You sit with yourself and wonder if the sacrifice really is worth it and even though it still burns throughout the day it doesn’t nearly burn as much as it used to – so you keep the pill.
Now you’re trying to hold it together pretending your body doesn’t hurt anymore because you can’t have spent all this money and energy into nothing and you’re not fooling your parents but are you fooling yourself. You can’t change treatment again there have been too many and your hopes can only endure so much. You’re still at university but which one and what are you studying. You don’t even know anymore. You hold on thinking about research and research and they must find a cure. Not for you. For your baby sister. She has it now.
I’m a French university student currently finishing my bachelor’s degree in languages – English and Spanish. I’ve always loved writing and I feel very fortunate to be able to do so in three languages at present. I hope to become a writer in the future and I often write short stories or memoirs during my free time to achieve such a goal.