In the course of writing my post yesterday, I decided to google "endometriosis blogs" and see what was out there. Maybe not the best idea. There were a bunch of blogs, but they were, for the most part, seriously depressing. One that stood out to me was actually titled "Endometriosis and Suicidal Thoughts." I didn't read further. I can state with certainty that even if I have to deal with chronic pain for the rest of my life, I have no desire to end my life.
Anyway, these blogs and their titles made me think about my perspective. I try not to dwell on setbacks or pain because it can become frustrating and overwhelming. I wonder though if by not sharing the really bad times if I make it harder to understand what I am going through. I wake up everyday and the first thing I think of is "check your pain level." I'm probably not going to write like the world is ending or that I have it SOO bad because in my opinion, there is always someone who has it worse than I do. I now refuse to answer the question "rate your pain on a scale of 1-10" because I am terrible at it. I was in very bad pain, but kept thinking there must be someone out there in worse pain than me, so that precluded me from answering 10 and probably downplayed what I was going through at the very beginning. I've learned how I need to answer that question if I'm in an ER but to me it is way too subjective to be effective. That doesn't mean my life is easy. I mean, 3 years ago, my life was pretty awful. I was so medicated and the pain was so bad that today, I feel almost glad that I'm doing better than that. But I'm not healed. There is no cure for endometriosis.
