rad in more ways than one

i have severe endometriosis. i was diagnosed at 16 and had three major surgeries for it before i turned 19. i started birth control for my six weeks long, heavy, debilitating periods when i started having them at 12. by 19, i had tried every birth control under the sun (with no success) – except lupron. lupron, a gnrh agonist commonly used on males as a treatment for prostate cancer, on women in fertility treatments, on women with endometriosis, aaaaand yup, this is the exact same drug parents let be injected into girls with the euphemistic title of a “puberty blocker.” (i promise we’ll circle back to this hold on) 

luckily, i live two hours away from one of the most accomplished endometriosis specialists/surgeon in the world, and he is so passionate about finding a cure or at least better treatments for women with endometriosis. he’s an obgyn but he literally doesn’t do the obstetrics part, he purely focuses on helping each woman find their best treatment for this disease. he has such a vast amount of knowledge on surgery techniques and surgical robots and different treatment options, and he is incredibly thorough when it comes to informed consent. if something could happen or has happened– positive, negative, or neutral– he will tell you about it. in detail. now this is important, because after decades of observing treatment effects and listening to women and researching side effects, his personal philosophy is that the lupron injection should be a last resort. like, after major surgery last resort. if a woman wants to try it first thing, he won’t stop her, buuuut after he gives her all the possible short and long term side effects, she usually is eager to explore other options. 

(enter me) 19, three surgeries, dependent on opioid painkillers just to be able to get out of bed in the morning, and now, a fun new symptom! every time i begin to bleed, my heart develops an arrhythmia and i experience constant, burning chest pain. i begin to violently cough up blood. so, my endometriosis has spread to my lungs, may randomly cause my lungs to collapse at literally any moment, and i’ve exhausted all treatment options. except! lupron. the devil drug. the horror stories i heard from other women were insane, and that was just the short-term side effects. my doctor had to go through the process of explaining both short and long term side effects as i cried in the office chair because i knew that i had to take this drug. there was nothing else left for me, and things were getting worse. so i did. i was on it for a year. you want to know what that year was like? 

i was suicidal, homicidal, and fell headfirst into the most severe and detrimental manic episode of my life. i experienced psychotic symptoms, and that along with the aforementioned symptoms led me to a week long stay at the psych ward. i did not have one day without severe joint and bone pain. i broke three bones, all while running or walking, when i had never broken a bone before. i’m already epileptic, but i had two hospital stays for uncontrollable tonic-clonic seizures while i was on it. i couldn’t sleep. i got night sweats and night terrors. i either couldn’t eat a thing or felt absolutely insatiable. regardless, i was always nauseous and got sick a lot. now, six years later, i still deal with worsening osteopenia, making me at high risk to develop osteoporosis. at 25. and the kicker is, it did shit-all for my endometriosis. it made me sick on top of sick on top of sick etc etc. and i’m not a rarity. men and women from all ages and all walks of life have experienced this and worse, and many people, like me, are still dealing with the fallout of it, years or even decades later. i do not believe this drug should be on the market for literally anything at all.

or was the story of my side effects bullshit? the story about how i had a year of my life taken from me with side effects that have literally been noted by people who research and thousands of people who’ve been given this drug?

because if so, it’s REALLY, REALLY fucked up for ANYONE to dismiss a black woman’s healthcare and issues and concerns, especially when they’re reproductive health issues! do you have any idea of the relationship between sadistic white male “gynecologists” and the slave women, my literal ancestors, that they’d use as “test subjects” for things like, oh i dunno, having to receive random ass major surgeries with no anesthetic while completely nude on the stage of an observatory theatre? are you familiar with the concept of epigenetic trauma? do you understand that the dehumanization and torture of black women in the founding days of modern gynecology STILL shapes racial biases in healthcare that literally cause preventable injuries, complications, and deaths of black women to happen?  you must be out ya goddamned mind to read a black woman’s traumatic female healthcare experience and muster up all that fucking nerve, gall, and audacity to make a useless piece of shit garbage comment like that. all that vulnerability, all that sharing, and you are such a fucking sociopath that you cannot even muster up fake sympathy, or better yet, leave me the fuck alone like i told you before.

see, you may have hit a fucking nerve with yr “bullshit” comment, but yr not fucking special. yr dismissiveness of my lived, real, documented, diagnosed aligns perfectly with the attitude of nearly every white male doctor i’ve encountered. from 12 years old, my serious physical health symptoms were essentially given the “bullshit” response. and it’s continued on since. but im not 12 anymore. i am a grown ass woman who knows and has meticulous documents of every treatment and surgery i’ve ever received along with personal dated journals describing its effects, which is actually what i referenced when talking about my experience with lupron, and some dummy on the internet isn’t going to trigger me into a spiral of traumatic healthcare-based memories and experiences.

Solomon’s Shield is the name of the app

It isn’t “building a shoddy ideology”

i just think people need to be cautious with their words regarding this and remember that yr personal experience is not universal, some women were not given a choice, some women were raised to believe they had no other choice, some women were young women who’d do anything to try to change who they truly love and desire all so they could avoid the eternal damnation of being sent to hell, some women had no family pressure but so much social pressure to just “try it” and maybe they just weren’t self-assured or mentally strong enough to not. so they’re not gold stars, and that’s fine.

So what you want me to do is only listen to gold star lesbians? Because they're the only real lesbians because they say so? I should completely disregard the lesbians who've been with men and who discuss the pressures that they've faces and feeling forced into being with men despite not liking them because obviously these women are bisexuals in denial and there’s literally no other explanation? Because absolutely no amount of misogynistic and homophobc social pressure could ever make a lesbian date or marry a man because a few gold star lesbians said that they didn't get with men and so no real lesbian ever would? We should just ignore the social pressure and homophobia which surrounds us because that could absolutely never affect someone and force them into dating people they're not attracted to because they think that's what they should do?

before everyone screams their heads off, I'm a gold star, so if we're gonna play this stupid game I get a seat at the discussion table. however, my wife is not. because her first sexual experience was when her female best friend raped her. and then continuously sexually assaulted her by forcing her into a secret abusive relationship, with the threat of outing her to her family as leverage (which was a terrorising option for my wife, raised in a Catholic home, as she feared becoming homeless). and in between being continuously assaulted by her BEST FUCKING FRIEND my wife was so traumatised that in an effort to normalise what was happening her, to force this new reality into some kind of bearable format that she could conceptualise and survive, in an effort to prove to herself that sex doesn't fucking matter anyway, she did the one thing she would have never actually wanted to do under any other circumstances- she got blackout drunk in a bar and found some man to have sex with. it was the utmost form of self destruction she could manifest. she is working through all the trauma this period in her life caused to this day. does this make her not a lesbian when she has ever only experienced desire for and, when given humane circumstances, only pursued women?

similarly my best friend, who I grew up with in a hugely homophobic and conservative eastern european country. this girl is gay with a capital g, figured it out when she was around 9 and then spent the proceeding decade trying to beat it out of herself because of her insanely homophobic and deeply neglectful parents, her religious upbringing that had taught her god wouldn't love her if she was gay (and when you don't have that many people to love you, god seems like a really good bet), and the overall homophobia that surrounded us on every corner in our home country. she ended up losing her virginity to a man on a beach blackout drunk, because she was so convinced that she had to keep trying, and maybe, just maybe, if she went ever further with men, the attraction would follow and it would turn out that she wasnt, in fact, gay. she was robbed of a first sexual experience that was loving, wanted and mutually exciting, and she can never get that back. is she not a lesbian?