Late Night Thoughts

I took my third pill tonight.

I'm on the pill. Not because I don't want another baby -- I want one desperately. I can't have one right now, for reasons so painful I can only glance at them and then change the subject. It's a shame for so many reasons, one of them being that conceiving and having a baby might do a great deal to alleviate the problems that are why I went on the pill in the first place.

I am so healthy compared to so many that I feel guilty for every frustrated thought or word I've ever had regarding my own body.

It wasn't too bad before I was working. Homeschooling is flexible. It can roll with the punches. But deadlines don't care how I'm feeling, and now that it looks as if I'm getting some real advertisers -- a couple more have signed on since my last posting on the subject -- I have real deadlines. This can't be just the magazine that comes out when I can manage to make it.

My odd symptoms -- odd in every sense of the word -- come and go. Some of them are one-time visitors. I spent almost three weeks last year in a state of -- well, not dizziness, but a state in which dizziness might descend at any moment, for any reason or no reason. I learned to be very careful not to move my head too suddenly, because the room would spin at the least little shift. I didn't drive except in emergencies. Getting up in the morning was like falling down a well. And then one day it disappeared, just like that. It hasn't been back since, but I know it might stop by again any time, just to see how I'm doing.

I've bought books about endometriosis, but I haven't read them as much as I should, because I'm still resisting the idea that I have it. I didn't know until after the dizziness came for its extended slumber party and I looked it up that it was one of many possible symptoms of endo.

I knew about irregular cycles, and heavy bleeding, and pain along with them that medication just glanced off of. That was the first clue I had to what might be wrong with me.

Then came stupefying sleepiness for days at a time no matter how much rest I got. And then an occasional pain so humiliating and intense that even I couldn't ignore it. I'm not a stranger to pain from within. My childhood was spent in an almost constant state of illness. I had pneumonia and scarlet fever and my left lung collapsed when I was seven years old. (Ironically, I had none of the usual childhood diseases -- chicken pox, measles -- possibly because I missed so much school that I never had the chance to catch them.)

Pain and weakness became roommates I learned to ignore since I couldn't evict them. I read incessantly, and learned that if an adventure story was engrossing enough, sometimes even the harshest asthma attack would ease up a bit. If it didn't, at least I had something else to think about.

And then came early adolescence, and copious bleeding and the pain I never questioned because everyone said that "cramps" were part of being female.

And then came my son's homebirth, because I figured I'd learned the worst my body could deal out and I wasn't afraid of some pain for a good cause like a healthy baby. (Which turned out to be more pain than I'd ever dreamed I could contain, in exchange for an almost supernaturally healthy child -- to this day he's barely been sick a day in his life.)

None of this prepared me for the pain I still have no words for.

It comes at night, usually. Usually just as I'm about to fall asleep, but sometimes it shakes me awake.

Sometimes it stays for ten minutes, sometimes for two hours.

Sometimes I can ride it out with one painkiller and a book and breathing and clenched fists. Sometimes I crawl whimpering into the bathroom and hope the other tenants in our apartment building can't hear me trying not to scream as I run the hot bath that probably won't help, but I can't think of anything else to do and I have to do something. I climb in and try the breathing exercises I learned for childbirth (they helped for about the first hour). I stare at the clock as if it's my executioner, and every fifteen minutes I allow myself another painkiller. I try not to think about what these episodes are probably doing to my liver.

With all this ibuprofen I've had to gulp down, I probably should have just gone ahead and become a heavy drinker, the way writers are supposed to.

My husband and I sleep separately, so I have to call him at work the next day to let him know I've had another nighttime visit.

Attacks, I call them. Not like a heart attack, but an ambush by an enemy in a war I still don't know why I have to fight.

"I had an attack last night," I say tersely, and he knows that if I'm unusually bitter or exhausted or depressed, he shouldn't blame himself, or inquire farther into the cause.

I have lived like this for so long, it's beginning to feel like normal.

A friend of mine won't let me keep doing this. She knows my feelings about doctors. Quite aside from my angry sense that they work for the insurance companies rather than for me, and my bitter experience that even women doctors can be condescending and disbelieving when it comes to "female problems," I don't like being dependent on an outsider for treatment I need. I take over the counter painkillers because I don't want to have to worry about getting a subscription, or wonder if we'll still have insurance by the time I need a refill.

My friend, who knows all of this and intuits more, and who has a science background, has procured a six-month supply of the pill for me, for free. Just try it, she says. If it helps, go to a doctor or a clinic -- there are clinics for this kind of thing, women's clinics, it doesn't have to be a doctor -- and tell them you want to go on the pill. You can tell them you were on it before and it seemed to help you. If it does. It might. Just try it.

So I am.

I hate taking something so unnatural into my body on a regular basis.

But natural isn't all sweetness and light, as I've seen for myself. As one of my favorite web sites likes to point out, poison ivy is one hundred percent natural. So is dying of the flu. Or living in pain.

I'm on the pill. Have been for three whole days.

I keep waiting for something to happen, and then reminding myself that what I'm waiting for is something not to happen.