Endometriosis Freelapse

Today has been strange and slow and silent. It is winter and everything has less colour and reminds me of my young skin meeting harsh air and going pink and coming back inside again and getting pinker.

Pain is an indulgence I allow myself monthly. Absence of pain, obviously is the ideal. But where do we go from there? I will, not unfortunately, have to live with pain for the majority of my life. I wouldn’t describe myself as a victim of this world or of my body. I would like to thoughtfully ask my body, if my body could speak, why it has chosen to grow endometriosis. I would like, simply to inquire - without prejudice or assumption. And I suppose I must thank it for the experience of something, anything - that makes me want to write.

During the pain, life is made in lots of colour - mostly red. It is a helpless sort of place, and you could say lonely but loneliness is very quiet and this pain certainly isn’t. After the pain, it is hard to remember what it all actually felt like. During the pain, you can’t quite tell what it feels like either, you cannot describe it with conviction or clarity or with any precise detail - the body just collapses - into a something blinding - and all you can do is moan and cry and flail about. You feel sort of ridiculous, or you would do if you were able to think about anything else.

Endometriosis pain is not like anything else, it does not sting like a cut or pang like a fracture or ache like a bang - it sort of does all those things at once - but inside like the ingredients of a soup.

The pain began at 2 A.M. I had been asleep for an hour or so. Occasionally the pain will plateau or recess so as I lay in the silver and slightly frightening light I contemplated whether the burgeoning sensation would end, if it was worth trying to sleep.  I was eventually called by the packets of various painkillers on my kitchen surface, and then shortly after I was called by my bowels. Endometriosis causes contractions which will make you shit every last molecule of crap from your body until there is nothing left to shit but the contractions remain and its not comfortable to be anywhere other than the toilet - if you could call that comfortable. The bowel contractions are painful and met in their release by a slight pleasure and I sat there in my filth for 40 minutes. There is so much blood it’s hard to know if you’ve cleaned yourself. The pain gets louder, my legs start to give way, pulsing and shaking, the soles of my feet burn and ache. Lying down intensifies the pain as my organs inflame and bleed outside my womb and the lack of gravitational pull lets it pool inside me like leaking gas, but standing puts further pressure on my burning legs so instead I crouch and pace and sit down for a moment and stand again and allow myself to lie just for a second before its unbearable in my abdomen so I stand again and moan loudly and worry my neighbours think I’m fucking which I wish I was but I’m not I’m in pain pain pain.

You are on your own most likely, this night I was on my own.

I called the ambulance service, I couldn’t remember my address.  To my great great fortune and gratitude a chariot of angels arrived twenty minutes later, it was around half past three A.M. The pain had not relented for an hour and a half. The outside was cool and exiting to my burning pain skin, and I felt like I was escaping some summer of agony into the nostalgic winter and no one was in the street so that was peaceful and the pain capsule of my flat was behind me and help was here. Reassuring women with drugs. A chariot full of drugs. They would take the pain away without asking loads of stupid questions. It was bright inside, I sat against the wall and slid slowly from my seat. The pain comes in waves and respite is a wave receding, readying itself for another attack. In this brief absence of sensation I lose control of my muscles, and they loosen to the effect of a limp cadaver, sliding off the chair - speechless. They ask me questions when the wailing stops, but - I’d need the pain to make a noise, to scream an answer: give me a second. In this state I envy nothing but to be painless. The women tell me to breathe on the gas, to breathe slowly in and out of the mouthpiece, but it makes me nauseous and it disturbs the panic of my body to clarify the sensations in my abdomen, they keep telling me to take it so I do and I suppose it helps but it doesn’t. The chariot is bright and makes noises, the lights are buzzing, there are monitors - they need me to be still so they can take accurate readings but I can’t control my reeling fish body, contorting and contracting and my limbs spasming in panic. The first dose of morphine is injected through a cannula and consciousness returns for a second taking only a second. A sudden quiet, all I can hear now is the burr of lights and machines and the rustle of starched olive uniforms. But this lasted a total of five seconds, the drive to the hospital was loud again and filled with pain pain pain and fuck fuck fucks. As we pull up the nurses/angels dosed me up once more before my wait inside the hospital - the extra morphine was needed and shortly after the bliss of it filled up my body: I slide into the wheelchair and then I’m helped onto a bed and they ask if I want to be propped up or lie down and I say down please and I’m being wheeled away and I look at the grids of poplin ceiling and fluorescent light recessing above my head and there are old old old men with gaping open mouths also being ferried past me, they look dead and I am young and alive and painless and peaceful and nothing is expected of me because a man is wheeling me somewhere and my body feels so damn good and I might just fall asleep and the sleepy sensation in my eyes and head is sort of orgasmic and I don’t even feel anything but nothing, but a nice nothing - a nothing I crave and covet as I’m writing this - painless.

Now like a fucking idiot, I wish I was in the chariot with the nice women who will inject my pain into nothingness. I wish I was on that bed being wheeled somewhere and my body felt that good after feeling that bad. I’m not in pain right now, although of course I am - who isn’t? Who doesn’t want to have two angels arrive and void their heartache, numb their political dread and give over expectations… to make existing enough and pleasurable at that.