Pelvic Pain, Part I
Feb. 26th, 2007 05:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beandelphikiI've had a personal health/body issue on my mind for a few days now, and I keep feeling drawn to getting it down in some format - on paper, on Livejournal, whatever. It concerns a subject I really haven't written much about in my lj before...or, in fact, in any journal I've ever had.
I don't think most FtMs like to say much of anything about menstruation. In actual fact, I'm not particularly shy about it, or bothered by the mere fact that I experience it. (Although it is annoying, and occasionally a challenge when you use men's washrooms.) But I don't at all like calling any attention to it.
It's long been a habit of mine to mostly avoid even mentioning anything exclusively pertinent to being born with a female body; somehow, I believe it'll be easier for other people to think of me as male if I simply play Let's Pretend (I Was Born With A Penis); the reality is that the people who can already mentally juggle the fact that I'm male with the fact that I have a female body are not ever the ones who are fazed by mention of my anatomy or what it does.
So this is the start of what's been on my mind; it's the background story, basically. Probably not deeply interesting to anyone but me. I was going to tap out an outline of what happened, and instead THIS came out, and I realized this story is something I need to get out in some level of detail, or it'll continue to pull on my ear. So.
Several years ago, when I was 16 or 17, I had an episode of lower abdominal/pelvic pain that was so bad, I sincerely believed I was dying. It started quite mildly, just as all my monthly-related pain starts - some aching in the involved areas as well as my upper thighs and lower back - and escalated. I hadn't yet seen blood, but I assumed it was coming.
Almost every female on my mother's side gets heavy, very painful periods that get heavier and more painful every year until mid-to-late twenties before tapering off. (My mother tells me that at one point, she actually visibly bruised from the cramping every month.) I'm no exception, so by my mid-teens, I was pretty used to that merry-go-round.
But this soon proved to be very different. The pain continued to escalate gradually but unceasingly for the next few hours. I went for a hot bath to soothe things, but by the time the bathtub had filled with water, it was making me dizzy. I stupidly got into the water anyway, and almost immediately started to black out.
Oh, shit. I don't believe I'll ever forget that moment, when the one fantastically clear thing that came through the encroaching unconsciousness was the awareness that I was alone in a very full tub of hot water in a locked bathroom, and mere seconds from passing out. DAN get out of the tub get out of the tub just do this one thing it can hurt later get out get out getoutgetoutGETOUT!
I made it out, and collapsed on the bathroom floor. I'm not totally sure how long I lay there then, although I know it was more than an hour. I tried several times to get up, and while I know I still could have, I decided each time to lie back down and wait some more to see if the next time would hurt less. Surely, I figured, there was going to be some limit to this. It was a wave, and it would ease off if I just waited.
When it had been more than an hour, I gave up on the waiting idea. Having a hard cool floor to lie on had helped at first, but it had definitely reached the limits of its usefulness. I decided that if I was going to hurt, it would be much better to go hurt in my own soft bed. So I forced myself up and off the floor and back into my clothes, and then drained the (cold, brr) water from the tub and staggered down the hall to my room.
I lay in bed for a while with my lights turned off, hoping to relax and maybe doze. Not happening; this Thing (I no longer was sure it was related to my period) was still getting worse.
This can't be my period, I decided. I would have been bleeding by now. I get intermittent pains in the days leading up to it, but when major pelvic pain sets in, that's the GO signal for Team Red. Something must be wrong. Something internal must have burst or something. I need to go to the hospital.
Which, I realized, wasn't going to happen at all if I never got out of bed and alerted my parents before the Thing killed me. Try screaming.
Screaming didn't exactly work, I discovered, because I wasn't able to scream. The pressure of drawing a breath to attempt it made my vision dance. I gave it my best shot anyway; the sound was pathetic. I listened for a moment, and realized that not a single member of my family was on the upper level of the house. They were all a floor or more away. I'd have to get up and go get someone. Oh, shit.
Reminding myself that I was possibly dying, and therefore might be dead soon if I didn't get out of my room and track down a parent, I pushed back the covers and tried to sit up. When that didn't work, I rolled out of bed instead. I clearly couldn't stand anymore, so I'd have to crawl.
Crawling didn't work. Trying to get up on hands and knees made me scream - soundlessly. Now what? Could I roll? I won't fit through the door, I'm not two feet tall.
In the end, I made it across the room by wriggling on my stomach the way babies do before they're able to crawl, dragging myself with my arms when I could. The hardest part was hoisting myself up high enough to reach my doorknob; from there, I squirmed out and halfway down the hall to the point where I could see just far enough down the staircase to know if anyone passed by below.
This is the point where the story gets fairly hilarious, in that comedy-of-errors sort of way. Because the first person to pass below on the next level down was my father.
Now, my father isn't a stupid man by any means. He's a computer engineer, and while I'm not dim either, his attempts to explain to me what he does at his job makes me feel like I'm having a conversation in Russian. I don't speak a word of Russian; not even, "hello."
But he can be very slow when it comes to people. He's not really on the autism spectrum, but he often seems puzzled by humanity's failure to act in entirely predictable and logical ways.
So there I was, lying on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and my dad walked into view from the next room; he even conveniently paused at the foot of the stairs.
"Dad," I tried.
No response. He hadn't heard me.
"Dad," I tried again. "Daddy!"
That time, he turned, looking startled. I couldn't blame him; I don't think I've called him "daddy" since the first grade.
"Dan?" He asked, coming closer to the bottom step. "What is it?"
"Help," I explained. "Something's wrong. Hurts."
"What?" He looked irritated. "I can barely hear a word you're saying. What are you doing lying on the floor and whispering, anyway? Get up and come here if you want to talk to me."
Down two levels, I could hear my mother typing away at the computer, thanks to open-plan living design. The typing noises stopped at this last.
"Dad. Help me."
"Help you with WHAT? If you need help, get up off the hallway floor and come tell me what it is that you want. If you think I'm coming all the way up the stairs to talk to you, you're quite mistaken, kiddo."
I turned my face into the carpet, marveling that my desperation was evidently so unapparent to him. Russian.
In our old home, we used to have a large plastic mat that we put the computer table (which was actually our elderly kitchen table from my earliest childhood) on to save the carpet. When you pushed back the computer chair (a big rolling armchair) too hard, it shot back right off the mat and slammed into the back of the couch.
I heard the sound then of the computer chair doing just that. Followed by the sound of my panicked mother running up a flight of stairs. Followed by the sound of her snapping at my shocked father, "Move out of my way, you goddamn idiot!" over his sputtered protest of, "Liza, wha?" Followed finally by the sound of her running up the last flight of stairs to the upper level, and she dropped to her knees beside me in the hall.
"What's wrong?" she demanded. "Why are you lying on the floor? What happened? What hurts?"
Dad might only speak Russian to me; but Mom speaks Mommy, and Mommy is the universal translator.
Far behind her, realization hit my father - "Oh! Something's wrong with him!" - and he hurriedly joined my mother by my side, who proceeded to carry out a hissed side conversation with him throughout dealing with me. ("Of course something's wrong Michael," - he hates being called anything but Mike - "or did you think that your son just likes to lie on the floor and call you for help?!") Is it any wonder they divorced shortly thereafter?
"Dunno," I informed Mom in response to her questions. "Something's wrong. Hurts. Hospital, please."
"Where, what hurts?"
I pointed.
"Is it your period?" Mom looked puzzled. Dad looked mildly horrified. I shook my head at them. No. No bleeding.
She decided that she needed to examine the area in question; I was past the point of modesty, so I didn't put up much of a fight over this decision. She and my father worked together (grudgingly: "I really can't lift him by myself Liza, but if you want him to be in more pain, I could try dragging him,") to lift my dead weight into their bedroom and onto their bed. Mom yanked my pj pants and my shorts down as low as common decency would allow and started poking around; Dad stood by looking helpless, and if he'd been someone else, he most likely would have been hand-wringing.
"Let me know if it hurts where I touch," Mom told me, gently poking and pressing around just below my belly button. At that point, nothing didn't hurt, but what she was doing was comparatively painless, so I shook my head to indicate the area was fine.
She kept poking ("Here? Here?"), and I kept shaking my head. She seemed surprised when she poked to one side, and got no more response than the poke before; she muttered to my father that she'd thought for sure it was appendicitis. Then she got to my pelvic region, and she got even more gentle.
"It seems a little swollen or something here," she told me and my father. "And rigid. And your skin is hot." She hesitated, then gave an experimental press to one side. "How's that?"
"Okay..."
The other side. "That?"
"O...kay..."
And the centre. "Th-" My mom didn't have to ask, since my thready scream answered for me.
"I think that might be the spot," my father deadpanned. Mom glared.
"Hospital now?" I inquired hopefully.
"Honey, I don't think that's a good idea," my mother said, and my father grunted his assent. Great, now they agree on something.
"Hospital, hospital, please."
My parents traded off explaining their reasoning. They couldn't see anything wrong but my reports of pain; if they took me to the hospital, I would most likely be forced to sit for several hours in an ER waiting room chair until I was seen. I would be much more comfortable at home, provided this really wasn't an emergency.
"We'll give you some Advil," Mom said. "Then we can tuck you into bed here. If you can still feel it when the medication should have kicked in, especially if it keeps getting worse, we'll take you to the hospital then. Promise. But try a couple of Advil first."
I reluctantly agreed - it wasn't as if I had much choice - and my father brought the Advil and a glass of water. Then they tucked me into their bed, bade me to sleep, turned out the light and left.
I have only the faintest memory of the period of time that followed, which is probably a good thing. Eventually, the pain really did start to ease off as the ibuprofen kicked in. The drugs didn't come close to wiping out the pain, but they did enough, and exhaustion took over and I dropped off.
When I woke (to my father shaking me awake - "Are you okay now? Because I want to go to bed, and if you're okay, can I have the bed back?"), the pain was gone without a trace. Gone like it had never been. Mystified by the way it had vanished, I went back to my own slightly chilly room, where I'd been writhing and whimpering just a few hours ago. Did it really happen? Possibly I'd imagined most of what had happened. A personal examination revealed nothing whatsoever wrong with me. Surely that couldn't be.
The next day, my period began.
--
More later.
I don't think most FtMs like to say much of anything about menstruation. In actual fact, I'm not particularly shy about it, or bothered by the mere fact that I experience it. (Although it is annoying, and occasionally a challenge when you use men's washrooms.) But I don't at all like calling any attention to it.
It's long been a habit of mine to mostly avoid even mentioning anything exclusively pertinent to being born with a female body; somehow, I believe it'll be easier for other people to think of me as male if I simply play Let's Pretend (I Was Born With A Penis); the reality is that the people who can already mentally juggle the fact that I'm male with the fact that I have a female body are not ever the ones who are fazed by mention of my anatomy or what it does.
So this is the start of what's been on my mind; it's the background story, basically. Probably not deeply interesting to anyone but me. I was going to tap out an outline of what happened, and instead THIS came out, and I realized this story is something I need to get out in some level of detail, or it'll continue to pull on my ear. So.
Several years ago, when I was 16 or 17, I had an episode of lower abdominal/pelvic pain that was so bad, I sincerely believed I was dying. It started quite mildly, just as all my monthly-related pain starts - some aching in the involved areas as well as my upper thighs and lower back - and escalated. I hadn't yet seen blood, but I assumed it was coming.
Almost every female on my mother's side gets heavy, very painful periods that get heavier and more painful every year until mid-to-late twenties before tapering off. (My mother tells me that at one point, she actually visibly bruised from the cramping every month.) I'm no exception, so by my mid-teens, I was pretty used to that merry-go-round.
But this soon proved to be very different. The pain continued to escalate gradually but unceasingly for the next few hours. I went for a hot bath to soothe things, but by the time the bathtub had filled with water, it was making me dizzy. I stupidly got into the water anyway, and almost immediately started to black out.
Oh, shit. I don't believe I'll ever forget that moment, when the one fantastically clear thing that came through the encroaching unconsciousness was the awareness that I was alone in a very full tub of hot water in a locked bathroom, and mere seconds from passing out. DAN get out of the tub get out of the tub just do this one thing it can hurt later get out get out getoutgetoutGETOUT!
I made it out, and collapsed on the bathroom floor. I'm not totally sure how long I lay there then, although I know it was more than an hour. I tried several times to get up, and while I know I still could have, I decided each time to lie back down and wait some more to see if the next time would hurt less. Surely, I figured, there was going to be some limit to this. It was a wave, and it would ease off if I just waited.
When it had been more than an hour, I gave up on the waiting idea. Having a hard cool floor to lie on had helped at first, but it had definitely reached the limits of its usefulness. I decided that if I was going to hurt, it would be much better to go hurt in my own soft bed. So I forced myself up and off the floor and back into my clothes, and then drained the (cold, brr) water from the tub and staggered down the hall to my room.
I lay in bed for a while with my lights turned off, hoping to relax and maybe doze. Not happening; this Thing (I no longer was sure it was related to my period) was still getting worse.
This can't be my period, I decided. I would have been bleeding by now. I get intermittent pains in the days leading up to it, but when major pelvic pain sets in, that's the GO signal for Team Red. Something must be wrong. Something internal must have burst or something. I need to go to the hospital.
Which, I realized, wasn't going to happen at all if I never got out of bed and alerted my parents before the Thing killed me. Try screaming.
Screaming didn't exactly work, I discovered, because I wasn't able to scream. The pressure of drawing a breath to attempt it made my vision dance. I gave it my best shot anyway; the sound was pathetic. I listened for a moment, and realized that not a single member of my family was on the upper level of the house. They were all a floor or more away. I'd have to get up and go get someone. Oh, shit.
Reminding myself that I was possibly dying, and therefore might be dead soon if I didn't get out of my room and track down a parent, I pushed back the covers and tried to sit up. When that didn't work, I rolled out of bed instead. I clearly couldn't stand anymore, so I'd have to crawl.
Crawling didn't work. Trying to get up on hands and knees made me scream - soundlessly. Now what? Could I roll? I won't fit through the door, I'm not two feet tall.
In the end, I made it across the room by wriggling on my stomach the way babies do before they're able to crawl, dragging myself with my arms when I could. The hardest part was hoisting myself up high enough to reach my doorknob; from there, I squirmed out and halfway down the hall to the point where I could see just far enough down the staircase to know if anyone passed by below.
This is the point where the story gets fairly hilarious, in that comedy-of-errors sort of way. Because the first person to pass below on the next level down was my father.
Now, my father isn't a stupid man by any means. He's a computer engineer, and while I'm not dim either, his attempts to explain to me what he does at his job makes me feel like I'm having a conversation in Russian. I don't speak a word of Russian; not even, "hello."
But he can be very slow when it comes to people. He's not really on the autism spectrum, but he often seems puzzled by humanity's failure to act in entirely predictable and logical ways.
So there I was, lying on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and my dad walked into view from the next room; he even conveniently paused at the foot of the stairs.
"Dad," I tried.
No response. He hadn't heard me.
"Dad," I tried again. "Daddy!"
That time, he turned, looking startled. I couldn't blame him; I don't think I've called him "daddy" since the first grade.
"Dan?" He asked, coming closer to the bottom step. "What is it?"
"Help," I explained. "Something's wrong. Hurts."
"What?" He looked irritated. "I can barely hear a word you're saying. What are you doing lying on the floor and whispering, anyway? Get up and come here if you want to talk to me."
Down two levels, I could hear my mother typing away at the computer, thanks to open-plan living design. The typing noises stopped at this last.
"Dad. Help me."
"Help you with WHAT? If you need help, get up off the hallway floor and come tell me what it is that you want. If you think I'm coming all the way up the stairs to talk to you, you're quite mistaken, kiddo."
I turned my face into the carpet, marveling that my desperation was evidently so unapparent to him. Russian.
In our old home, we used to have a large plastic mat that we put the computer table (which was actually our elderly kitchen table from my earliest childhood) on to save the carpet. When you pushed back the computer chair (a big rolling armchair) too hard, it shot back right off the mat and slammed into the back of the couch.
I heard the sound then of the computer chair doing just that. Followed by the sound of my panicked mother running up a flight of stairs. Followed by the sound of her snapping at my shocked father, "Move out of my way, you goddamn idiot!" over his sputtered protest of, "Liza, wha?" Followed finally by the sound of her running up the last flight of stairs to the upper level, and she dropped to her knees beside me in the hall.
"What's wrong?" she demanded. "Why are you lying on the floor? What happened? What hurts?"
Dad might only speak Russian to me; but Mom speaks Mommy, and Mommy is the universal translator.
Far behind her, realization hit my father - "Oh! Something's wrong with him!" - and he hurriedly joined my mother by my side, who proceeded to carry out a hissed side conversation with him throughout dealing with me. ("Of course something's wrong Michael," - he hates being called anything but Mike - "or did you think that your son just likes to lie on the floor and call you for help?!") Is it any wonder they divorced shortly thereafter?
"Dunno," I informed Mom in response to her questions. "Something's wrong. Hurts. Hospital, please."
"Where, what hurts?"
I pointed.
"Is it your period?" Mom looked puzzled. Dad looked mildly horrified. I shook my head at them. No. No bleeding.
She decided that she needed to examine the area in question; I was past the point of modesty, so I didn't put up much of a fight over this decision. She and my father worked together (grudgingly: "I really can't lift him by myself Liza, but if you want him to be in more pain, I could try dragging him,") to lift my dead weight into their bedroom and onto their bed. Mom yanked my pj pants and my shorts down as low as common decency would allow and started poking around; Dad stood by looking helpless, and if he'd been someone else, he most likely would have been hand-wringing.
"Let me know if it hurts where I touch," Mom told me, gently poking and pressing around just below my belly button. At that point, nothing didn't hurt, but what she was doing was comparatively painless, so I shook my head to indicate the area was fine.
She kept poking ("Here? Here?"), and I kept shaking my head. She seemed surprised when she poked to one side, and got no more response than the poke before; she muttered to my father that she'd thought for sure it was appendicitis. Then she got to my pelvic region, and she got even more gentle.
"It seems a little swollen or something here," she told me and my father. "And rigid. And your skin is hot." She hesitated, then gave an experimental press to one side. "How's that?"
"Okay..."
The other side. "That?"
"O...kay..."
And the centre. "Th-" My mom didn't have to ask, since my thready scream answered for me.
"I think that might be the spot," my father deadpanned. Mom glared.
"Hospital now?" I inquired hopefully.
"Honey, I don't think that's a good idea," my mother said, and my father grunted his assent. Great, now they agree on something.
"Hospital, hospital, please."
My parents traded off explaining their reasoning. They couldn't see anything wrong but my reports of pain; if they took me to the hospital, I would most likely be forced to sit for several hours in an ER waiting room chair until I was seen. I would be much more comfortable at home, provided this really wasn't an emergency.
"We'll give you some Advil," Mom said. "Then we can tuck you into bed here. If you can still feel it when the medication should have kicked in, especially if it keeps getting worse, we'll take you to the hospital then. Promise. But try a couple of Advil first."
I reluctantly agreed - it wasn't as if I had much choice - and my father brought the Advil and a glass of water. Then they tucked me into their bed, bade me to sleep, turned out the light and left.
I have only the faintest memory of the period of time that followed, which is probably a good thing. Eventually, the pain really did start to ease off as the ibuprofen kicked in. The drugs didn't come close to wiping out the pain, but they did enough, and exhaustion took over and I dropped off.
When I woke (to my father shaking me awake - "Are you okay now? Because I want to go to bed, and if you're okay, can I have the bed back?"), the pain was gone without a trace. Gone like it had never been. Mystified by the way it had vanished, I went back to my own slightly chilly room, where I'd been writhing and whimpering just a few hours ago. Did it really happen? Possibly I'd imagined most of what had happened. A personal examination revealed nothing whatsoever wrong with me. Surely that couldn't be.
The next day, my period began.
--
More later.
