The New Normal

When you have a cold, you know that rest and fluids and perhaps some cold medicine will help you recover quickly. Within a finite amount of time—maybe a few days, a week or two at most—you'll be back to normal again.

The same holds true for other ailments. Break an ankle, and although the recovery may take time and be painful, you know at some point in the future your ankle will be healed. Have a headache? Take some pain reliever, give it some time, and you'll be back to your old self.

But it doesn't work that way with chronic illnesses like endometriosis.

For starters, there's still a lot of uncertainty about what causes endo. Without knowing a cause, we can't do much in terms of prevention. Taking a flu shot, washing your hands frequently, and avoiding exposure to others with germs are all relatively easy preventative measures to take to reduce your risk of contracting the flu. With endometriosis, there are no such "easy" steps.

Even more importantly, though, endometriosis has no cure. Although there are things we can do to lessen our symptoms, endo is a constant in our lives that we can't chase away no matter how hard we try.

We just have to learn to live with it.

That's what I've been struggling with lately. My endo symptoms didn't really appear until about 3 years ago—and I had a nice reprieve when I was pregnant with and then nursing my son—so it's only now starting to sink in that this is something I am going to have to deal with, and dare I say accept, for the long-term.

"Feeling good" will no longer have quite the same meaning. Now it's "feeling good ... considering I have endo."

This isn't to say there aren't days when, for the most part, I do feel good. There are days when I can almost forget I have endo altogether. But most days lately, the symptoms are pretty constant. And I'm realizing I can no longer grimace and think, "It's OK. I'll be over it soon." Because at least as far as the endo symptoms go, I might not. Not now. Not for a long time.

The other thing that makes this particularly difficult—and perhaps different from having other chronic illnesses, where you know exactly what symptoms you'll experience and when—is that the nature of endo symptoms vary so greatly from day to day.

Take yesterday, for instance. First thing in the morning, I had my usual intense back pain, concentrated in one specific spot in my lower right back. It usually fades for a while late morning, comes back with brief ferocity once or twice throughout the day, and settles in again with more intensity for a bit at some point in the evening.

Then I had an occasional feeling in the area of my left ovary, a fullness and discomfort reminiscent of when I had the giant endometrioma on my other ovary. This is a rather new sensation, and honestly it makes me a little nervous that there's another cyst growing. Then, for a period of time, I also had this incredibly sharp pain in the area where my right ovary used to be. It was much different from the full feeling on the other side—more like someone was stabbing a little paring knife right into my pelvis in one specific spot, over and over.

Plus, of course, there was the general feeling of fatigue that seems to follow me through most days.

And that was just yesterday. Today and tomorrow may have some similarities, or they may be totally different.

So I have no choice but to get used to this state of not knowing what any given day will bring, of recognizing that this isn't a temporary condition. There is no end in site. Rather, this is just the way it's going to be now. I can try regulating the symptoms with medication, with diet, with natural therapies. I will, and hopefully that will make things better. But I'm probably never going to see complete relief. My health and body are probably never going to be back to the way they were before.

This is the new normal.