Facebook’s memory feature has the unique ability to derail my entire day.
I have had just the one account, Lyn Lyn Padrones, since my sister made it in 2010 to give her account gifts in Farmville, and I have changed neither email nor name associated with the account since. Thus, unlike most of my peers, who have over the years lost their jejemon era “Aqu0h xxii h3l3N” accounts to the passage of time or ‘net café hackers and therefore had to remake new ones, I still have all of my younger memories online on just this one Facebook account.
Sometimes it’s nice. My mom and I celebrated our eleventh Facebook friendversary a few days ago and we got to see all of our beach trips again. However, Facebook sometimes shuffles up photos that I think would have been better lost to the Lethe rather than brought up, again and again.
In a kinder, pre-surveillance tech world, I would have forgotten that twelve years ago, I fainted from intense menstrual cramps moments before I was to compete in the National Schools Press Conference.
The photo was of me, lying sideways on a bed and frowning on the phone, my coach and beloved teacher Carol Lagan fanning me. Not pictured, beyond the frame, were the wheelchair that I collapsed in on the way from the classroom to the clinic, a pad of generic painkillers, and a lukewarm water bottle, floppy and dead, spending the last heat of its moments trying desperately with all its might to stop the clenching, horrific pain in my abdomen, a war that seemingly had no end in sight.
Like most people with a uterus, I’m no stranger to menstrual pain. I was not the only person in my family or friends that has passed out in the middle of whatever I was doing because my guts decided that today was the day to squeeze itself out. That was not what I was trying to forget.
That photo marked the first time in my life that I realized that I was at a disadvantage because of the body I was born with.
It was just one cramp out of many I would have in my life. It was not even the worst cramp! (That honor begrudgingly goes to the Big One that laid me down a flight of stairs in senior high school, and landed me three days in a hospital right after our classroom Christmas party.)
But that moment of being laid low on a scratchy little bed in Subic led to my grudging acceptance, some years later, that I have a Puson, and that it was a Problem.
God has given me the grace to be born and raised in a village of women of all kinds, shapes, sizes, walks of life, and to be given their sound advice. The stories I heard about infections, blood, and body horrors at age thirteen could make a grizzled war veteran shiver in their boots.
That entire monologue in Fleabag about women with pain built in- that was the monthly bugle call for everyone who started their menses.
The list of things I was taught was normal to expect if you have a uterus: passing out from blood loss, weird cravings, feeling lightheaded, five to six months in between bleeding. I spent most of my young life believing that pain is part and parcel of menstruation. Pain was the bubble wrap that comes free with every monthly delivery.
Every woman has their panacea, their sureball hangover cure. There is always an old wife or widow or spinster who will listen to your ailments and insist that you call on a friend whose child is a nurse or a pharmacist, or to go to this peer-reviewed masseuse trained abroad who knows how to squeeze the sickness out from your veins out through your fingernails.
Meanwhile, things I learned that were definitely not normal: growing hair on my chest, adult acne, water weight that doesn’t seem like water and actually just looks like normal fat and muscle distribution, but in places I did not expect to see them distributed yet, at least for a few more years.
How did I know they were not normal? Well, inherently, those were not bad things. They didn’t cause me excruciating pain, at least not physically. They just happened one day. Poof! There they are, on me. New texture, same skin.
Socially, those not-normal things did a lot of damage, especially those who were used to seeing me as a malnourished pre-pubescent waif. Prime advice I received was to finally ask a hormone specialist about it- which, due to my limited budget, meant looking up the nearest available OB-GYNE and asking if this had something to do with my Big P, mainly that it has been months since she has paid me a visit.
When my Puson Problem was finally christened with an Official Name on an OB-GYNE’s prescription years ago, (“Polycystic Ovary Syndrome… positive means good, right? Like, I don’t have multiple cysts on both ovaries? Right?”) I thought I was finally done with it all.
A diagnosis! With a diagnosis, surely a solution might be close behind! I mistakenly thought that whatever it was, it would fix me so, so well, that it would be like the Fountain of Youth somehow, that I would just take a couple laps and all of a sudden reverse back into a form that has not and has never been touched by scary, unexplained illnesses.
I was thinking that I could take one pill perhaps, or a treatment plan, or a surgical procedure that I would have to put on an ever-increasing list of “Things to Treat Myself To When I Get Older And More Sophisticated, Perhaps” and then I would get cured forever and ever and never have to be ailed by anything ever again.
Nope. With a big, popping P.
This was not to be cured by any fad diets, nor miracle brew. Even a lifestyle change, or bi-monthly glutathione/inositol infusions can only do so much, according to some studies.
PCOS is a chronic hormonal issue! It will never leave me now.
I could not pinpoint when, exactly, I crossed the line. But now, Puson Problem has officially become my Puson Life Partner– I look up health insurance offers with her in mind.
I plan my whole life around her, my dream forever house is designed to accommodate the both of us in our old age. She is with me now, through the slog of law school and the strange hours I keep, suffering when I thus suffer, and she will be with me when I get comfortable enough to start thinking about having my own kids.
She was on my mind, when I saw that photo of me twelve years ago. Like an old married couple unexpectedly seeing each other in the back of their older photographs, or a mother looking at bikini photos she took during her first trimester. “Oh, look! I didn’t know that you were already there, in my life.”
Maybe this particular Facebook memory hit me differently because a few scrolls before that, I saw one of my friends from law school, who took a leave of absence to get married and have kids, whereupon she visited a specialist to get treated. We bonded in 1L over being working students, learning how to study late nights in order to accommodate our PCOS diagnosis.
A few scrolls before that was my high school friends’ post, a cheeky reference to the inside jokes of our very old circle of twenty-somethings, regarding on who gets to win the right to give a nickname for the first baby to be delivered by our friend group, coming soon this April.
It had all snowballed- just this past year, one of our number suffered a miscarriage, another got engaged, another broke it off with a longtime partner, moved to a different city, others are developing careers that they did not study in college for, others are going back to school again. So many other problems and passions already, beyond the puson.
My mom told me, when I first got my diagnosis, that she had friends who had daughters who also had the same symptoms as I had, the learned normal ones and the discovered not-normal ones. Like the old widow that she is, she has been telling them about what I discovered, the horrors I go through. Maybe so they won’t feel alone. Or, more likely, just to spread the word.
She told me how many of her friends admitted to knowing someone or confirmed that they knew someone who also had my diagnosis. “Uso na talaga yang PCOS na yan ano? Wala mang ganyan sa amin dati.”
That, well. I don’t know for sure. I’m thinking maybe there was. They just didn’t name the pain yet.
