A Little Hystery

I got my period when I was 14, exactly as Dr. Joos had predicted after poking me in the midsection. It was fairly uneventful, except that I couldn't go tubing at the lake that day because I was a woman now.

One month later, I was back in my brown brick and angular prison of a middle school, sitting in class and suddenly I was in so much pain that I sincerely feared that I was going to die before I could get to the hospital.  I went to the school nurse, who asked if perhaps my pants were too tight. I girlishly agreed to go into the school bathroom and check. On the other side of the door, I realized I was bleeding and I was breathless shocked.
The pain was perfectly normal.

Because middle school is already a series of stark moments where you are forced to understand that some brutality or injustice is just part of adulthood, I was perfectly primed to snap up my pink shorts, lift up my chin and walk with grotesque acceptance back to class, telling the nurse I’d made a mistake.

Every month or so from that one on, I would get this spider sense that it was coming. Not a physical sensation, just an intuitive doom.  Not knowing its source, I still learned to trust the premonition, and when I felt it, to drop what I was doing and make a contingency plan.

About the pain, it can’t be described. An approximation would be to say that it is as though a slotted head screwdriver with a dull blade about two inches wide is pushed onto the place directly between and slightly below my hip bones.  It starts out light and then gets harder, slowly, and deliberately. At some point, the head of the screwdriver breaks the skin and begins to turn, wrenching the viscera there tighter and tighter into a twisted agony, like a wet shirt caught and wound up in the blade of the washer.  

A different pain works on the base of the sacral promontory. A dull, cannonball thud at increasing intervals, that hits to crack the bone, sits in the crack and then  swings back to hit again. It radiates out and sends shocks of pain down towards my knees, and also up, veering on a lightning fork path away from my heart and out my fingertips. It is something like that, and it lasts for about four hours, eight at the longest.

And also there is a more metaphysical experience.  In the way that amputees describe phantom limbs, the field of what can be thought of as me extends an inch or two outside my body,  and the space there, which contains no flesh,  throbs into awareness and aches sharply also. The line between me and the world becomes uncertain, the pain leaks into the surrounding area.

Describing the pain, and also feeling it, triggers in me the knowledge of people’s assumption that I am exaggerating. I know that what’s dully called “cramps” as a cultural joke, and as always the broader thinking contends with my experience for legitimacy, even in my own mind.

Therefore, in addition to the physical experience my shame gets clicked into high gear.  The shame of being female and irrational, not measurable by the appropriate tools. The shame of weakness. I have no discipline for this feeling. I cannot sit still and consider it, it won’t be breathed through. The pain owns me and manipulates me and drags faith from my animal parts because I pray and pray when this happens for it to stop or for a minute to rest. And in those resting minutes I dwell on the nature of the pain whose scale is a sign of my feminine inability to accurately assess what’s true.

Or maybe my pants are on too tight.

In high school, when this happened, I would bite into the flesh of my hand, or if I was alone, take a hammer or the corner of a book and beat myself in the lower belly. It was a relief compared to the pain inside and besides, I could control it. In front of school we had some metal posts with rounded tops to prevent cars from driving into the schoolyard, and they were low enough that I could throw the lower part of my body on top of them like a battering ram to get a moment of that aching relief.

I inevitably ended up in the nurse’s office.  A girl with cramps.  An embarrassing cliché. I would try to be stoic, but inevitably the lightning strikes of pain would cause me to hit the wall with my fists and feet, to moan and squeal, to tear at my hair. Sometimes the nurse would ignore me, and sometimes suggest that I take my histrionics home.

I learned about medicine, how much advil you could take before you got a stomachache. (6 or 7) But it hardly made a dent. In Canada, I went to the emergency room and the Canadian doctors gave me codeine for the pain. For the first time in my life when the air quivered portentously, I had a defense.  The codeine dulled the physical pain to almost nothing, quieted the mental experience, because it gave me control and I was no longer embarrassing myself.

Then we moved back to America, where they wouldn’t prescribe the codeine anymore, and it was back to the floor and the hammer.

In college I went to the emergency room twice more because the pain had made me pass out and throw up. Both times, the doctor was really pleased with himself when he located the source of the problem by asking whether I was menstruating.  “It’s your period,” one told me. “Sometimes there’s pain with that.”

On my third emergency room visit, I was referred to a gynecologist, the first doctor in the history of my life to look at what was inside my womb in response to my complaint. I was diagnosed with uterine didelphys, which means I have two uteruses, and with endometriosis, which means the walls of my uteruses are thick with extra tissue and scars. I was prescribed birth control pills. The pills were great for pulling me out further on the tide of madness, but they didn’t do much for the pain and I stopped taking them.

Around that time, I had a root canal, for which I was prescribed Tylenol 3. I bore down on the root canal and its aftermath and saved the pills for my periods. I started seeking out dental surgery. I found out that I could buy codeine over the counter in Canada and more sketchily in Mexico, and when I went to these places, I would stock up, especially after I graduated and lost my health insurance and access to dentists.  I counted, saved and plotted.

In China, where not even aspirin is available, I did without.  I made it a habit to rent a hotel room every month so that I could scream without being heard through my apartment’s thin walls and so that I could vomit into the shower or a western style toilet,  since it was unsanitary to lay on the floor of a Chinese bathroom and I did not like puking in my room.

A year or so after I returned from China, I started to get the warning pain when my period wasn't coming.  Not the full blown experience, just a whisper and a twist. It got to the point when I was feeling it every day, but I didn't want to go to the doctor because I didn't want to find out I had some horrible cancer that would bankrupt me before it killed me.

When I got health insurance again, I went to a gynecologist. I requested a woman. As soon as I sat down on the table, I started crying so hard that I couldn't choke out an answer to the doctor’s questions, which embarrassed and annoyed her. She sent me to a specialist, who did tests and another specialist who did tests and I cried and cried until I hit the end of the testing line, a kind of souped-up ultrasound. The doctor sympathetically told me that he couldn't find any reason why I would be having the pain. He was sorry, but there was nothing there that could be medically seen.  So I left.

It never really got solved, and sometimes I feel it, but what can you do? My new doctor, blessedly, put me back on the codeine, which I am allowed to have as long as I come in for a drug test every six months, and mostly it works.

 Every once and a while, like yesterday, the pain gets through, and I am back on the floor, back at the mercy of it, passing out and waking up in the shower, asking Andrew and Rachel to make the pancakes, exiting mid-rehearsal to barf. And that is part of my life.  It’s not rational and it’s not karmic (rest easy, Eve) it’s the fact that existence is in part brutal and that demands submission and that it will remind you of this.