PCOS and My Life

Posted on by jadeactually

At the age of fourteen I still hadn’t started my first menstrual cycle. My mother took me to the doctor because I started spotting but never had an actual period. The doctor determined I had PCOS, or Polycystic ovary syndrome. I started taking birth control pills to regulate my menstrual cycle.

I was fourteen so I didn’t really understand. All I had to do was tell my mom when I was running low and it helped me feel normal. I know that sounds strange, but when you’re in middle school anything different made you an outsider. This was the time of our lives we were supposed to be going through puberty, but I couldn’t until I started birth control.

I was okay with that, until I found out what PCOS really meant in terms of the rest of my life.

At a checkup for how I was doing on my pills they decided to check on my ovaries and my uterus. My doctor told me my uteran lining was abnormally thin. She told me that because of this, if I ever got pregnant then the chance of me carrying to term would be a million to one chance. Again, at fourteen this isn’t exactly a huge problem for me. I was much more worried about my history test coming up.

But then I met the person that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with a few years later. That changed everything. My whole life I had no plans for my future. But for once I did. I wanted to be a mother to a child that I would never be able to have with the man I fell in love with and married.

I finally did research on PCOS and what that would mean for my life. And I tried for three years, have still been trying, and now I’m losing hope that I will ever have a child of my own body.

And now? Now I’m laying in bed while my husband is upstairs spending time with his sister and her two children. Normally I would be with him. But I’ve come to hate his sister. Not because she has what I feel I never will. But because she always wanted a daughter.

Can you imagine what that means for her firstborn, her first baby that happened to be a boy? It means that for the last three days I’ve watched a woman baby and even favor, one of her children while the other one watches with this look in his eyes. This devastating look of knowledge that absolutely NO three year old should ever have in his eyes.

And can you imagine how my heart has shattered every time I catch that look in his eyes?

There is a mouse in my house.

Posted on by jadeactually

Last night I did not sleep. I recall bolting upright deliriously at least 4 times. Because there is a mouse in my house.

It started with a strange shuffling sound. My spouse and myself were laying in bed watching Netflix (Shera, beautiful anime). I demanded my spouse pause it and I sat and listened but there was only the sound of us breathing.

“Did you not hear that?” I asked my spouse.

“Hear what? You’re hearing things.” They said.

I shrugged it off thinking maybe it was just the ice in my glass of water. We went to sleep, I of course dreamt of ghosts. When Supernatural is your favorite tv show, of course ghosts are the first thought.

Two mornings later I felt a weight pressing on my legs. My spouse woke me up leaning over me (the first thoughts through my head were burglar). Then I heard what had woken my spouse, the sound of tiny little paws on wood and the sound of sharp little teeth chewing on something.

At this point I was so tired all I could do was say,

“Told you so,” and immediately fall back asleep.

Each time we returned home from the store for the next week and a half there were expletives and,

“We forgot traps again!”

And it got more and more brave with each day we forgot traps. At one point I saw it! Little gray thing. But finally I picked some up. We baited it with peanut butter (who knew mice like peanuts?).

For a week now, ever since I saw it its avoiding the area we set the trap. But that means one thing: now it has to go behind our bed to move around.

Its taunting me now. I’m sleep deprived at this point, barely eating, showering a ton because ew, mouse. Delirious. But no more.

Tonight I will pull my shelf away from the wall beside my bed, only enough for a trap. Now if it wants to move it will need to go over a trap.

I’ve always been against harming any living creature, but tonight I hope instead of skittering, chewing, and squeaking noises.. the only sound that will wake me up is the sharp CRACK of one of mouse traps.

There is a mouse in my house. But not for much longer.

This is life and I guess I’m sticking to it.

Posted on by jadeactually

I’m 21 years old and sometimes my life feels like absolute chaos. Legally, I turned 21 four days ago. Realistically, I feel like I’ve been 30 my whole life. 

I don’t live at home with mom and dad anymore, I’ve never been a partier. I didn’t rebel, I never felt the need to. I stayed at home, I read books and I watched tv with my family. I’ll admit that I was a little bit mean to my sister, but not because I needed to be. It was because I didn’t want to look weak.

I have no idea why I felt the need to look strong to my family, but that’s the way I was. Because even my earliest memories I can remember feeling different. I remember feeling depressed before I even hit middle school. Looking back now, I was living a happy life, but not living happily.

“If I was dead, I wouldn’t be going through this.”

The first time I remember thinking this, I was probably 13. I was depressed before, but I always just thought that’s the way it goes. When I first had that thought though, it changed everything. Every time after that, whenever I had that ripping pain in my heart and the walls felt like they were coming down on me, I’d remember:

“If I was dead, I wouldn’t be going through this.”

In a weird, unhealthy way, it helped. I would almost instantly stop crying, but not because it scared me. I would stop crying because I would go into a kind of autopilot. I locked everything inside me and went about life like nothing happened. If anybody asked if I was okay, Yes. I was.

It wasnt technically a lie. At that moment they asked, I was, because in my head it didn’t matter, we all die anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I had happy instances. Moments where I felt free of that dark shadow that wraps itself around my heart and weighs down my head and shoulders. Split instances where I could laugh and be okay. But they were fragments of my life. Like one little ant on one long stretch of sidewalk. Tiny, easily stepped on. 

Things got worse and my mind spiraled farther and farther into that shadow where I stored every thought so I could function. But there was too much. The closet in my brain where I kept it all was bursting at the seams. Little things leaking out of the sides like in the cartoons.

The things that leaked out, they just kept oozing like an infected wound. And it was too much. At 16 I broke down and I told my mom I needed help, I couldn’t handle it anymore. She took me to the doctor and that was the first time I started antidepressants.

They didn’t do all that much to help me but I was trying to make it work because I just couldn’t handle the pain in my chest anymore. But I had met my spouse shortly before that and for some reason they never left.

It was like I finally could handle the weight that was pressing on me and holding my head down. I could look up and see the stars in the night sky that my spouse had hung for me. They were pinpricks of light, but so many of them in that darkness.

We got engaged, I finished school, I moved across the country into our home that we bought. We got married and I stopped taking the antidepressants. My spouse was my light and for the first time in my life I was okay.

Three months later things changed. We tried to help somebody and they screwed with my mind. Once again I was in the darkness. And for the first time in a long time I had that thought again.

“If i was dead, I wouldn’t be going through this.”

And for the first time ever, I considered what I could do to make that my reality. And that was the first time I was truly scared of myself. I woke up my spouse and told him the truth and we called a doctor the next day.

I got new antidepressants. I told my mom, she was glad I was trying to take care of myself, but she warned me that the particular ones I was prescribed were known to have some harsh side effects. But they were exactly what I needed.

Without them I feel overwhelmed, like my feelings are too much, like I can’t think straight. With them, I can process and I can organize my feelings.

Due to financial issues I’m not currently on them. But I’m doing better. I haven’t had any suicidal thoughts in a few months because I’m on a good schedule that’s helping me function. This is my life now and I think I’ll stick with it.