I’m going to tell you about what’s wrong with me. You have things wrong with you too, though perhaps you can’t pinpoint the location somedays. Maybe you can others. Maybe it’s a woman, maybe it’s a man, maybe it’s a bank statement. It would be un-ladylike of me to not tell you to stop reading if you are squeamish.

I like to tell myself to chin up and walk proud, though I’ve seen a million doctors and they all say the same thing: When my Paternal Grandmother was pregnant with my Father, she was given a Thalidomide to aid in the pregnancy, which was her first, in a post-Depression New England America, where the medicinal think-tanks were thriving, where experiments with surety were conducted. What the Doctors didn’t know was this dose of hormone would cause severe birth defects in the following generation, and I am that generation.

I was eight years old. I was walking down the stairs to play in the yard, and I remember holding onto the doorknob to get outside, and squeezing it with everything I had, in tremendous pain in my lower abdomen. The pain passed and I went outside and I would wait seven years to tell anyone about it, because we have bodies, and sometimes they hurt, and so we move on, that is where the pain I can remember started. When I was fifteen, I began to have pain so severe, my family had to rush me to and from the hospital averaging maybe every-other month. Face pale white, could-not-talk kind of pain. I-don’t-know-what-is-happening kind of pain. The wards of children’s hospitals are terrifying, and they get worse when you don’t know what’s wrong and a college freshman Candy Striper comes into your cloth-walled cell to tell you she can teach you to play cards.

Before we go any further, I would like to tell you about Uwe Boll. Uwe Boll is a retired boxer turned Independent German film director with a PhD in Literature who is considered by some, comparable to Ed Wood, and one of the worst film makers in history. Uwe Boll has directed over twenty-one films since 1991, and written two books on the subject. Apparently in Germany, there used to be some kind of private tax kick-back for film investors funding projects within the county, making Uwe Boll’s films non-profits. The majority of his catalogue is film adaptation of video games, a film version of House of the Dead is one of his more recent, for example. I don’t bring him up because I care whether you’re into his movies or not, I bring him up because I want to tell you about the time he invited his critics to physically fight him for twelve rounds in a boxing ring. Film critic Chris Alexander, one of the people challenged to the duel, said the situation was “The weirdest pop culture bizarre journalism stunt I’ve ever been involved in.”

I bring up Uwe Boll because if I could fight being sick in a ring I would, but I can’t. Being “a sick kid” is sort of like a constant boxing match with the world. Uwe Boll recently referred to two of his critics, directors Michael Bay and Eli Roth, as “fucking retards,” for example. Misguided or not, awful at what he does or not, Uwe Boll still has more heart and tries harder than most. (Five critics did accept his invitation to fight in a boxing match, and he did proceed to kick each of their asses one after the other, by the way. Widely documented.) Don’t get me wrong, life is hard in general. Doing anything is hard. We all have our private wars and crosses to bear.

So one night, I’m overnight in the children’s ward of Umass Memorial in Worcester, Massachusetts–home to Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”–and an infant is in a plastic incubator next to me. He is coughing with the croup, and when I wake up from a morphine-induced sleep, he is gone. When I ask the Nurse where he went she tells me he didn’t make it through the night. I can’t fight that.

Meanwhile, people like Padma Lakshmi, first famous for her relationship with Salman Rushdie, then for her time on the television show Top Chef, are suffering from the same illness I was (in part) about to be diagnosed with. She took the Uwe Boll in her and she received a Genius Grant and founded a research wing at MIT to look into our problem. My tiny family unit in our own way kept trying. I was lucky, and we found a Doctor who thought he could help. In Boston at Children’s Hospital, a Doctor who had been on CNN said to us, “You have Endometriosis I think, and you will be okay.”

The sort of empowerment that comes with having a small lifetime of illness and then coming into information about it is something I can liken only to finding a soul-mate. To finding a reason. Two weeks after my High School Graduation, I was assigned my first Laproscopic procedure, a day surgery routine. Your belly button gets opened and a camera goes into it and some people look around to pinpoint the problem. There was a short story in a Ploughshares I cannot find in their archive told from the perspective of a woman with Endometriosis. Endometriosis as discussed in the story, is when a woman doesn’t fully shed her menses, it stays put, it travels to other organs, it sticks, it causes internal inflammation and tissue scarring, it’s gross and it hurts, and it’s common. 55% of American women have Endometriosis in one of the four stages my Doctor has defined for the AMA, and most don’t know it. So you think: will this period blood that stays inside me travel to my lungs? My heart?

That’s not the issue. The issue is what I look like on the inside. One of my fallopian tubes developed in utero with a knot in it, my uterus herself a teenie underdeveloped runt of a gal, lopsided and hanging to one side, the size of a small child’s.

When I went back to the Doctor’s office in the Tower, to hear my diagnosis, after recovering from the surgery, I didn’t think I was at 17 years old, getting a decision which would change my life, I thought I was getting another answer. At the time this was what I was told: I could get pregnant, I would do this by having my uterus stretched to make room, and there would be one baby. There would be one baby birthed into this world from my mortal coil via Cesarian-Section at six or eight months, the baby would live, and there would be no other. I walked out of that office understanding that things are asked of people because they can handle them, and that I at 17 years old, was one of the 19 diagnosed women on the North American continent at the time with what is called a Unicornature Uterus: I am the unicorn.

I spent the summer working as a waitress. I went to community college to begin my education. I got a two bedroom apartment with my high school sweetheart and four other male friends, I put it all out of my mind. I didn’t talk about it, I didn’t think about it. We had been together for five years when we started to grow apart. We had been through the end of high school, most of college together, and we weren’t winning anymore. Our house was crumbling and so we called it quits and I was faced with facts: There would someday be other lovers, and they would see my scars, and what would I tell them? My downfall into a pit of misunderstanding everybody else began. When my friends would complain about their period cramps, I would try not to scoff. I would try not to think, “You ever wake up really thirsty? How about not pregnant?” R. Kelly came out with a song this year called, “Pregnant” and the chorus is, “Knock you up. Knock you up.” And it sucks.

Then there was Jennifer. My friend Jennifer was smaller than me, more neurotic and nervous than me, more upset than me, and she had a story. She was born prematurely, she was a Cesarian-Section child, she had spent the first three months of her life in a tiny plastic incubator room while her mother pressed her hand to the window and pleaded. I thought about what it must be like to not hold your child. I thought about what it must be like to be in there and look up. I realized that I didn’t want to tell anybody this. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about this. Not lovers, not boyfriends, not friends, and I didn’t. I think the worst thing in the world is pity and I couldn’t stand mine for myself and so, I avoided it. There have been lovers I have slept with who have never been told any of this, and I wonder if then, we ever truly connected, and if then, I have been living a lie. I began to think about other people like me. Uwe Boll may have some kind of part of his brain missing? You now what actually bothers me? My main hurt and emptiness isn’t even for myself rather, it’s for whoever ends up deciding they’re nuts enough to love me. To accept that in addition to being a writer, which is crazy enough, that I may wake up in pain in the middle of the night, that I may think I know what sad is and not want to talk about it, that the only way I can birth their flesh, their parent’s blood, is through a myriad of medical procedures I don’t even know I have it in me to stand. I worry that I’m going to have to say, “Hey, is your Mom going to tell you I’m not right because of this?”

In 2005, in Bangalore, a girl named Lakshmi was born. Lakshmi was born with eight limbs. Durga, the Hindu Goddess has eight arms, for one, and Lakshmi, born in a spiritual place which worships many Deities with eight limbs, was herself thought magic. I thought: there is my sister, that could have been me. I see someone in a wheelchair born with no legs, I think, that could have been me. I think ten people died while I was typing this and all you care about is trash day. I began to slowly realize that there probably would never be a child of my own because I couldn’t go through with the process. The work to get pregnant. I am not Charlotte from Sex and the City, I do not have any money nevermind an endless supply.

Then there was the Times blog about prostate cancer and my life changed. Jim Tucker started the Prostablog and it was important. Ovarian Cancer has Gilda Radner and not many men have comfort to look to, and I found the fact that he was coming out and talking about the truth of what it is like to be sick, in a non-self pitying way, in a not angry way, in just a real, honest way, one of the most important pieces of journalism I’d ever seen. He was saying he was sick, he was saying his wife was sticking with him through all of it, but more, he was apologizing to her. I felt that I was apologizing to everyone who might end up loving me before we even loved each other.

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Photographs by Alejandra Laviada courtesy of Danziger Projects.

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