clairecheney

Thought I'd share my latest piece on PCOS with you lovely ladies. This is kind of a rant but I wrote it for a fiction class so I figure it belongs here.

Enjoy!



I’m watching what I eat. Seriously. I know it sounds like some kind of bad joke coming from me but I’m serious. I’m the girl who loves junk food. Chocolate and crisps and burgers and pizza. Chinese and Indian and Italian and Thai. I love them all and more. But I’m not allowed them.
I’m also off the booze. I know. You’re all sitting there wondering what the hell I’m taking, which drug I’m on. But no, I’m not on drugs, nor have I taken leave of my senses and narrowly avoided the mental ward of the local hospital. My liver isn’t working, not the way yours does or the way mine used to. I can’t take the booze.
I’m a regular to another ward in said hospital. It’s a special clinic for people just like me. Women just like me. Oh yes, there are more like me. Three million in the UK alone. You know, that means that there is one in ten people who are like me. Incidentally, that’s the same statistic as gay people. But back to the topic at hand. We don’t have cancer. We aren’t the bald headed ones who you can see that they’re sick. No, this is a hidden epidemic. Because what we have is not something you can see. It’s under our skin, running through our veins. It’s Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, and it’s a pain in the arse.
Let’s start off with the basics. It’s a disorder of the endocrine system, which basically means your hormones. With a woman who has PCOS there are too many male hormones and not enough female and they‘re doing some weird jive with my insides. Kind of turns us into ticking time bombs with all of you just waiting for the mood swing from hell. Also means that things go a little crazy with all our bodily systems.
See, it’s not the blood tests that get me. I have those once a month. It’s no big deal, just a little needle taking six vials of blood every time. Neither is it the weight gain, or the cosmetic aspects that rule my morning routine before I even leave the house. It’s not the cocktail of pills I take every morning, or the invasive and, let’s face it, downright unnatural scanning they do of my entire reproductive system. It’s not even the fluctuations in my moods that gets me. It’s the unknown.
The unknown. It’s a damn scary place for any normal human being, but add in the PCOS and suddenly it becomes a scene from a horror movie. See, with all these hormones fluctuating about the place things start to go a little haywire in my body. Well, there’s my liver, which has already decided to pack it’s bags and vacate. Fair enough, I don’t blame it. It was living on a roller coaster ride, I think I’d move out too. Then there are the others, the ones just biding their time. My heart, kidneys, stomach, nervous system, bones, blood, pancreas and, never forgetting, the seat of my femininity: my reproductive system. All these hormones doing the tango make it a little difficult for them to function properly, kind of like a permanent hangover from hell.
So my personal unknown here is that things can go wrong. You all know me, I’m control freak girl. But with this I’m living on a time bomb. Things inside me can go wrong at the drop of a hat. That small lump I find in my breast could become cancer. In fact, it’s very likely that it will. The lack of periods, something most healthy women would see as a blessing, is slow building threat. A threat that has been building steadily for the 12 months since my last period. See, without periods, without the pain and embarrassment and self conscious paranoid behaviour that comes with the monthlies, the lining of my womb is likely to turn cancerous. I could also develop diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, risk of heart problems and risk of a stroke. Pleasant right?
But let’s go back a bit. The cosmetic issues. That’s the thing that makes most women with this depressed. And I’m not talking about ‘I’ve just got the weepies!’ depressed. I’m talking slit your wrists and call yourself Dave time. You know? The feeling my usual writing usually induces. That’s the one.
See, it’s bad enough that we have trouble getting pregnant and then a high risk of miscarriage. That’s enough to make any woman feel less of a woman. But when you factor in what’s going on, on the outside of our skin, it’s a wonder there isn’t a major influx at the local morgue. There’s the weight gain. Fair enough, everyone now is watching what they eat. But not with quite the rigid strictness that we live by. It all has to be carefully picked and measured and written down and for god sake just give me a Mars Bar! Bad enough, but still, there’s more. There’s that horror movie again, getting worse.
Next, we have the skin. The bane of my existence. It is my own personal antichrist. It’s like a courtroom every morning. Exhibit A, the huge spread of acne. Painful and going to need a bucket of concealer to hide. Exhibit B, the hair that shouldn’t be there. The hair that came from the depths of hell. Hair that will take at least ten minutes every morning to painstakingly shave off. And, accompanying Exhibit B, then there is the hair loss. Hair loss! My hair is getting thinner. I’ve had to cut my long hair to try and save it, like a last ditch attempt before I do a Britney and find the sheers. And finally, we have Exhibit C. This is a combination exhibit, with thickening and darkening of the skin and skin tags, which are little gross looking pieces of skin that decided to grow overnight.
Really, when you put it all together, is it any wonder that we’re anxious and depressed? Really, the wonder is how we even manage to leave the house feeling like some circus freak. Eleanor Roosevelt once said “A woman is like a teabag. You never know how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” I think she might have been onto something there.