March Counts as the Start of the Year, Right?

Warning: this blog post gets into the details of my recent health issues which were relating the female reproductive system and the gastrointestinal tract. If you’re just here for the writing stuff skip to the paragraph beginning “All this to say.”

I can’t believe it’s already nearly the end of March. I feel like I should be hanging around sometime in the middle of November 2023, not a quarter of the way through a year that I feel like has barely started. Most of that feeling is owing to the fact that the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 were difficult to say the least. Said difficulties actually started in June of last year when I started getting more and more severe abdominal pain during my periods and ovulation after switching from an IUD to oral birth control. After a series of ultrasounds, I was diagnosed with what appeared to be ovarian endometriomas – where endometrial tissue (the tissue that makes up the uterine lining in the lead-up to your period or in preparation for the implantation of a fertilized egg) forms cysts on your ovaries. It’s not a pain I’d wish on anyone.

My medical team initially told me that they wanted to take a wait-and-see approach because I do want kids, and surgery can create scar tissue on your ovaries, which can affect fertility. So I tried to tough out the pain, taking prescription pain meds and clinging to my heat pack for dear life. It got to the point where I was having more bad days than good days. And then, one day in early December, my pain was so bad that I thought it would be a good idea to go to the ER in case it was appendicitis or ovarian torsion. It was neither. However, my trip to the ER earned me a referral to a specialist gynecologist who decided I was a candidate for laparoscopy to try to diagnose endometriosis and potentially relieve my pain.

I went in for surgery in January, and they found…absolutely nothing. My ovarian cysts had broken down, and there was no sign of endometrial tissue anywhere that they could see. My biopsies and blood work all came back completely normal. My ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus and cervix are all in ship shape and working order. This was emotionally confusing because, on the one hand, it was a good thing that there wasn’t anything wrong, but on the other hand, the lack of findings had me questioning myself for a bit. Had I imagined the pain? Was I being too sensitive? Do I have an accurate perception of reality? And then, the anesthesia exited my system, revealing that I was very much not imagining the pain.

So, the surgery provided no answers except to tell me what the pain wasn’t, but I was still in pain. So, I decided to look at another symptom I’d been having since November: persistent constipation. After some googling and talking with my mom, I came across something called Ileocecal Valve syndrome, which is where the valve between your large and small intestines stops functioning correctly and low and behold, it’s located exactly where the predominant source of my pain has been. So I looked up some exercises I could do to ease the pain and they worked. Coupled with a stool rehydrator (TMI, I know), my pain has almost completely gone away.

I’m probably one of the few people who’ve had a bowel issue mistaken for a gynecological one rather than the other way around. Seriously, the rates of endometriosis being misdiagnosed as something else are staggering and frankly discouraging in 2024. Although I do still think I need to keep endometriosis in mind because if I don’t have an IUD, my periods cause crippling pain (and I do not mean that hyperbolically. There are times when my periods are so bad that I cannot walk properly and I get so light-headed and nauseous that I worry about fainting).

All this to say that I spent November, December, January, and February primarily focused on figuring out why the fuck I’ve been in so much pain. So, I haven’t been able to spend much time on anything else (that and feeling very appreciative that I have access to Medicare in Australia). But now that I’ve hopefully figured out what’s going on, I’ve been able to dig into my beta readers’ feedback and work on revising The Storm Weaver’s Daughters. I’ve made pretty good progress on my revisions since the end of February, and my goal is to have the novel at a point where I feel comfortable pitching it to agents by the beginning of June, when I’ll be attending the Nebula Conference. It’ll be a lot of work, but if I keep focused, I think I’ll be able to get there or at least very close to there.

Other goals this year include getting back into submitting my short stories, posting more book reviews to the blog, and finishing last year’s NaNo novel, which I know I said I would try to finish in December/January. However, as mentioned above, I had other things to focus on. I was so absorbed with working on The Storm Weaver’s Daughters last year that I barely submitted anything, and I still believe in a couple dozen of the short stories that are just sitting in my cloud drive, which isn’t doing anyone any good. So, it’s time to get back into the swing of things with weekly submissions. I’ve yet to decide if I’ll do my September submission challenge again this year. We’ll have to see how the year unfolds. As for book reviews, I like reading and recommending books. I already have my annual round-up of favorite reads that I’ve posted the last few years, so I might as well start writing more regular reviews. In the meantime, you can follow me on Goodreads and the StoryGraph to see what I’ve been reading this year.

How has the start of the year been treating everyone else? I hope it’s been kinder to you than it has been to me.

Thank you for reading