The Very Beginning
As Julie Andrews says, it’s always a great place to start…
My story begins in Texas, January 22nd, 2020. It’s the second semester of my senior year in high school and I had recently come back from interviewing with colleges for my major. My mind and body are ready to be graduated from high school so I’m counting down the days to leave!
*BEEP* My alarm sounds off at 9 a.m. and I roll over to get out of bed. As I am sitting up on the edge of my bed, I have a really sharp deep pain in my abdomen that is generalized to everywhere. I struggle to be able to stand up and for some reason come up with the *not so genius idea* to grab my backpack (that was filled with textbooks) to swing it over my shoulders to pull myself upright.
As one would expect, the backpack method only made things much worse. Hunched over 90 degrees, I hobbled to the bathroom to see if peeing would help. Nope, still not great. I got my clothes on and hobbled my way downstairs to my mom. I explained to her that I was feeling weird we decided that I should lay down on the couch for the remainder of the time before I went to school to see how I felt.
Within this very short fifteen-minute time period I went from talking to suddenly crying in severe pain and unable to move. I was grabbing tightly at my whole left side of my abdomen and flank. My mom and dad rushed over to try and gather what made things escalate at random. I couldn’t talk and my body was in full fight or flight mode. We had lived nearby to a doctors office so we went there first to get their advice as to what was going on. My dad picked me up and transported me into the car as I continued to cry and hold tightly to my left abdomen.
Unfortunately, doctor’s offices tend to not expect patient walk-ins so we spent half an hour in the waiting room with me crying in a chair again, clinging STILL to my left abdomen. When we were finally let in, I was in too much pain to be examined and was rolled up like a roly-poly. We were advised to go to the emergency room at a nearby hospital.
I’m in the car and shocked by the amount of pain I’m in. My knees are tucked up by my chest and I still haven’t let go of my left abdomen or back- the pain is in such a large area that I’m not able to grab everything to hold it tight to try and reduce the pain. I remember feeling afraid in the back seat since the doctor had said it might’ve been a intestinal blockage that would require surgery. I was writhing, crying, and groaning in pain all completely out of my control- I was just in my head along for the ride as my body’s fight response took over.
It was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life.
I got into the emergency department, and they were hesitant to give me pain medications because they didn’t know what was causing the pain and where it was coming from.
They ran blood tests, urine tests, and did a CT scan of my abdomen with everything coming back normal. After 8 hours from the initial onset of pain it began subsiding for no apparent reason. The ER doctor came and said they had a few guesses as to what it might’ve been; they had seen on my CT an ovarian cyst on my right ovary and said maybe there was one on the left and it ruptured. They said because I went to the doctor’s before coming to the ED the fluid might’ve already started being absorbed so they couldn’t see it by the time I got the CT done. Their second guess was an ovarian cyst rupture with a possible partial ovarian torsion which meant they thought that a possible cyst could’ve been heavy enough to twist my ovary and when it ruptured it released back. And their last theory was a potential kidney stone that we might’ve missed during the urine clean catch (which makes you not use the first stream as the sample).
I was sent home and told if something like this happened again to go straight to the hospital and ask for an ultrasound to try and catch if it’s an ovarian cyst rupture.
I took the next day off school since it was still a little challenging to stand and move around but returned to school on the 3rd day. After about 5 days I was completely back to normal and tried to ignore the randomness of the unknown flare attack and if it would strike again.
So, the verdict? Unknown, and this only begins the unknowns that are left ahead. Still to this day I have no idea what it is that happened, only guesses.
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