I would like you to imagine that you are a 15-year-old girl. It’s the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and you’re getting ready for the church potluck. You’re in the restroom getting ready, when suddenly you feel an intense pain in your lower abdomen and pelvic area. The pain is so horrific that you have to sit down and pray for it to will pass. The pain doesn’t go away; in fact, it gets worse. This is worse than any period pain you’ve had, and that couldn’t be the answer anyway because you just ended a few days ago. But still it feels as though someone has taken a white-hot, battle-dull sword to your innards and is slashing around trying to find something in there. The pain gets so bad that you call out for your mom, making a sound that your sister describes as “a dying cow” for almost 10 years afterward.

Your mom comes in just as the pain migrates and changes. She asks what’s wrong as your vision blurs and then blotches and then leaves. While that is happening you lose control of the muscles in your neck and are unable to keep your head up. You're unable to continue sitting up, so you slide to the ground. You can’t see for at least a minute, and all the while your family comes in to see what happened. Truth is, you can’t tell them, because you don’t know. You can’t move, and it hurts to even adjust your legs in the fetal position you’ve gathered yourself into. So you stay like that while you talk to your mom about going to the hospital.

About two hours after the pain started you’re in the ER waiting to be taken back, but grateful you can finally move with minimal pain. As you go back they make you use a wheelchair so you don’t collapse while walking. Then they run a full workup, ultrasound, blood panel and a CT scan of which all come out clean. The CT results specifically come back about two hours after you’ve already downed the nauseating dye which added to the heaps of medicine that were already pumping into you. 12 hours after the pain came you get the diagnosis, and your mother starts crying next to you because it’s the one thing she prayed she wouldn’t pass down.

You’ve been diagnosed with Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome, and that means you’re walking around with sacks of fluid inside of you. Those sacks have been known to spread to other areas of the body, but are usually attached to at least the ovaries. If one burst like it did that morning the placement of the attachment could be the difference between life, death or losing an ovary. The size matters too, you learn that if one gets bigger than three centimeters in circumference they have to operate. It so happens the ones they found are borderline. Your risk for miscarriage just increased. You risk for ovarian cancer just increased. All the plans you had for your life, all the children you wanted to have, suddenly they seem like a pipe dream that might never come true.

The kicker to all of this? The only way to treat PCOS is birth control, and that doesn’t even stop the growth of new cysts; it just slows it down and decreases the chances of them bursting. So the choice now is: do you go on birth control or do you take the risk of having another cyst burst at any time? Obviously, the answer is common sense. You take the pills, but then the repercussions begin. People ask why you’re taking them if you aren’t active. Others think it’s OK to steal them if you “don’t really need them.” So when the pills disappear you have to shell out more money to replace them; money that you may not have to spare that week, but what choice do you have? All around you old men talk about the issues of your body and countless bodies like yours, without understanding your struggles. They don’t know the pain you go through monthly. They will never know the fear you live with daily. But this is life with PCOS. Welcome.