Parasitic Growth Hitchhiking on My Ovary

This post is going to be a little awkward because it involves some very personal details about my current physical and health. I want to begin incorporating stories from my real life in my blog, not just poetry reflecting it.

I used to have very regular periods. I always started within one to two days of my app's prediction date. Day 2 of bleeding was always my most painful day, but it was manageable with ibuprofen. Then two years ago when I was sitting in my Sophomore math class, I felt this really dull ache in my lower abdomen. I knew I was supposed to be starting my period so I was already prepared and wearing a pad. As the class continued, I started to feel nauseous. When the class ended and I was walking to English the pain in my abdomen got much worse. I also began to feel really dizzy. I walked as quickly as I could to my next class, which was English. When I got to the class, things went bad very quickly. The color drained from my skin, I looked paler than I had ever before (which is really saying something because I'm a natural red head), and I felt sick to my stomach. A girl in my class asked if I was okay and I said no. She rushed to the teacher's desk and told her that I didn't look good. My teacher told her to take me to the nurse's office. On the way, I was hunched over crying because the pain was excruciating. I was so dizzy that my vision suddenly went white and I collapsed to the ground. I was consciously aware, but it took a minute or two for my vision to return. The pain was so bad at that point that the girl had to half carry me to the nurse's office. 

When we got to the office, the nurse took one look at me and then tried to grab me. I collapsed to the ground. Apparently, I was hyperventilating and screaming at the top of my lungs, wailing in pain. I don't really remember much other than that everything was hurting so badly. The nurse called my parents and my dad had to come pick me up because they didn't know what to do with me. When we got home, I couldn't even make it to my room. I collapsed on the couch and continued to cry in agony. My dad tried to get me to take some pain medication, but the moment I swallowed it I threw up all over the floor. The pain and nausea lasted for over an hour. Afterwards, my entire body ached and I was exhausted. I spent the rest of the day sleeping.

After that incident, the horrific pain continued to happen. Sometimes it even happened multiple months in a row. My periods also became very irregular. It got to the point that my periods could happen anywhere between 2 weeks early to 12 days late. This has caused so much frustration because I can never predict when it will happen. That meant that I had to be prepared for the whole month. For the first year of my "cramps from hell," I had about a 10 minute window from when I started my period of when I had to take some sort of medication, such as Midol or Pamprin, to stop the cramps from happening. However, this last year nothing has worked. I have had to miss several days of school and I am just fed up with all of this.

The worst part of all of this wasn't the cramps, fevers, cold-sweats, panic, vomiting, nausea, dizziness, fainting, or diarrhea. It was the fact that my mother wouldn't do anything to help me. I kept telling her that something was terribly wrong with my body, but she wouldn't listen. She just told me that I had really bad periods and the only way to fix it was to begin taking birth control. "And that's not going to happen." Her logic was that by giving me access to contraceptive, it would give me permission to have sex. It didn't matter that I have a medical need for it.

So after two years of unimaginable pain, my school nurse told me that she believes I have cysts and that was why I was in so much pain every month. My mother finally listened to me after I told her what the nurse said and made me an appointment at a gynecologist office.

At my appointment, I met with the nurse practitioner because the OBGYN only really deals with pregnant women, in fact he was the one who delivered me. The nurse practitioner told me that the pain I was experiencing was very likely to be a cyst and that it wasn't fair for me to have been suffering so long. She gave me a sample pack of birth control and told me to go downstairs for an ultrasound. After chugging water for over an hour, my bladder had finally lifted my uterus up enough to be seen. The ultrasound technician took several images of my ovaries, measured them, and then sent them to the nurse to look at. When I went back in to see her, she told me that I have a 4.8cm cyst on my left ovary. This monster is twice the size of my ovary, and has been growing for two years, putting pressure on my body and making me sick.

She told me to begin birth control that day and after 2 months I am supposed to go back for a recheck. I have been on the pill for a month now and some of the side effects really suck, but it takes about three months for the body to adjust to all of the hormones in my body. For the first time I have experienced ovulation pain and I feel like I have PMS emotions 24/7. I'm really anxious about going back to the doctor. If this cyst grows any more, I have to have surgery to remove it....