It Took 15 Years and Dozens of Doctors to Find the Cause of My Pain

As told to Nicole PajerMy periods were painful right from the beginning. When I was a teenager, my mom used to let me skip one day of school every month because the pain was so bad. But when you’re young, you don’t really know how your period compares to anyone else’s. You only know what you experience. So when people said, “Oh, it’s just your period,” I believed them. Every 28 days, the pain would come, and I learned to compartmentalize it. I told myself, I just had to get through it.The really intense pain started after I had my appendix removed when I was 17 weeks pregnant with my first son, Eddie. I also had a difficult C-section when he was born. About a year later, I started telling doctors that something was wrong with my stomach. I couldn’t stretch it. I couldn’t do a cobra pose or lean backward without feeling like my stomach was being pulled apart.Doctors thought it might be a complication from my appendix surgery. An MRI showed a surgical clip in my abdomen and tissue connecting my uterus, bladder and abdominal wall. I had laparoscopic surgery to investigate, but afterward the doctor told me the MRI had been wrong. Nothing was wrong with me.Except I knew something was.I ...