Originally Posted by DrewM

Not a poem but I'm not sure where else to post this.

I wrote this while thinking about a male friend of mine who said mean things to me about my weight. He's known me since high school, when I was thin, and I got the "you used to be so hot" speech from him. This was before I had even heard of PCOS. We're not really friends anymore, but I saw him recently at a wedding and the topic came up. I didn't get a chance to give the explanation I wanted. Hence this:

You don’t know who I am? Of course you do. You’ve seen me dozens of times before, maybe hundreds. I’m the large girl standing in the corner, trying modestly to participate in the conversations in the room, but hoping nobody pays too much attention to me. I’m wearing large, baggy clothes, hoping to hide the bumps and bulges I’m so ashamed of. I’m pale because I don’t venture into the sun often, because in the sun you can see all the skin ailments and other oddities I try so desperately to hide or erase, in the privacy of my bathroom, through a veil of panic and tears.

And mostly I’m hoping that you don’t think about me too much, because I’m afraid you’ll come to the typical conclusion that I am a waste. A girl with a pretty face in a nasty body. A once vibrant girl who let herself go and stopped caring about how she looked. And you’re partly right, but not in the way that you think.

What you don’t know about me is that I have an illness. One that robs women of their confidence, sexuality, and femininity. This illness doesn’t have a cure, and barely has a name. It’s a syndrome, meaning that it is diagnosed by looking for a generally accepted collection of symptoms. I know it doesn’t sound very menacing, but this illness strikes at the heart of everything that makes a woman a woman. Her beauty, her grace, and her ability to procreate.

What? You say that you don’t judge people who are sick? You wouldn’t do that? Well, you’re wrong. You do it all the time, when you look at, assess, and dismiss women who look like me. Because 1 out of 10 of them, possibly more, has my illness. That’s the estimate for how many women it affects. But it’s only an estimate, and many of these women probably don’t know they have it. Why? Because there are still doctors who don’t know what it is.

It’s called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or PCOS. At its core, PCOS is a hormonal imbalance, affecting testosterone, estrogen, and insulin, and any number of other hormones. And because hormones play such a vital role in the body, regulating virtually every function, this imbalance causes a broad spectrum of seemingly unrelated symptoms. The most well-known and accepted include uncontrollable weight gain, male-patterned hair growth, acne, hair loss, irregular or missed periods, depression, and the tell-tale cysts on the ovaries. It’s been linked with insulin resistance, thyroid disease, and diabetes. It can also prevent a woman from having a baby. Some women experience all of these symptoms, others have only a few.

The diagnosis of PCOS can seem almost subjective, with one doctor dismissing it and another convinced of its presence. A woman can go undiagnosed for years, and many who are self-diagnosed are sent away by doctor after doctor who won’t believe it. And just as there is no definitive test, there is no cure. Sure there are treatments, handfuls of giant pills which make us sick, but unfortunately the best medicine is good old fashioned diet and exercise.

Did I lose you? Yes, we need to eat right and work out, just like you and everyone else on the planet. But what you don’t understand is the giant handicap. What works for normal healthy people just isn’t enough for women with PCOS. It’s not enough to simply watch what we eat and try to stay active. Strict diets and intense exercise are needed for even the smallest improvement in our symptoms. It’s very difficult and so far the success rate does not look promising. None of us want to be fat, and it may look like we’re not trying, but believe me, it’s all been tried.

So you’re right about one thing: I stopped caring so much about how I looked. Not because I let myself go in the first place, but because PCOS struck and changed the very core of who I am. And the constant struggle to regain my former self, the agony of self-revulsion, shame, and the torment of watching hope crash and burn over and over again, has left me with this:

I’m the girl standing in the corner, hoping nobody looks too closely, hoping they won’t see their judgment of me reflected in my own eyes.