My name is “P,” and this is (yet another) story about my Ovarian Cysts.
A few years ago, I used to work in the city, smack dab in the heart of midtown Manhattan in Rockefeller Center. Like many who made the trip, I commuted from the suburbs of New Jersey, five days a week to get to my job. That was a little under two dozen hours on public transportation over the course of five days, on top of working full time as a supervisor on Fifth Avenue. It sounds tedious and mind numbing (and that’s because it sort of is) but it was routine and I dealt with it for the sake of a great paycheck and stability.
One day, I had just gotten off the bus at Port Authority Bus Terminal when I felt an odd twinge in my gut. It was uncomfortable, but nothing I’ve not felt before so I outwardly ignored it. But in the back of my mind, an alarm bell had started to ring. Twelve years of dealing with this nonsense made it so that I could spot another Ovarian Cyst related issue.
Unfortunately, time had not made me wise as I made the mistake of reassuring myself that I could somehow weather this like I did all the other Ovarian Cysts that ailed me in the past. The plan was to get to my place of work, lock myself in a bathroom for however long it took for the pain to stampede over me, and then clock in and deal with the aftershocks for the remaining duration of my shift.
In my head, this was a perfectly reasonable and totally achievable plan. Just a quick trip uptown on the E train, three stops towards 53rd and 5th and then three streets over to my place of business. On average, about ten minutes out of my normally ludicrously long commute time.
“If I can just get to my job, I should be fine.”
Down two escalators and a flight of stairs later, I caught the blue line just as it got in and entered without preamble. It’s not even nine in the morning yet, but the subway car is packed with an eclectic but balanced mix of office wear and hard hats – a typical sight at that hour and I had fit right in amongst those about to start their day.
Two stops into my trip, the twinge is stronger. Suddenly my hand is gripping the balance pole in a death grip, in anticipation for what’s to come. The pain strikes like a large boulder dropped on an ice pick embedded in my abdomen. I got rocked with waves of agony, and somewhere in my addled mind I was thankful that I was still standing. I had other unrelated muscles spasming like ripples at the edge of a pond long since disturbed but unable to still themselves from the shock of it all. My teeth were clenched so hard that I’m surprised I didn’t shatter them from the pressure.
While all of this was happening, not a peep of sound escaped me as I stood amongst the other nameless bodies on that morning commute.
After twelve years, the sensation of an Ovarian Cyst bursting from within was as familiar to me (if not more so) than the routine that took me to work nearly every day.
And that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? Most women will have a slew of Ovarian Cysts during their lifetime, and will never know it because the body tends to just get reabsorbed in the body.
As previously mentioned, I am not one of the “usual women.” And the problem is that no one really knows why. According to an article over at HopkinsMedicine.org, “experts don’t know why some cysts break open and some do not.” I’ve just become accustomed to occasionally being in blinding pain for a day or so once every few months. I’ve dealt with it, the best I could, with as little pain medication as possible and it had in turn become “no big deal” and just another part of life.
It was on this day that I was forced to realize that it was a much bigger deal than I had originally tricked myself into believing.
The 53rd and 5th street underground subway station may not be the deepest in the MTA, but with escalators spanned 94 feet in length (each) it was a long journey on a normal day. Even with more than a decade of experience handling my Ovarian Cysts, there’s nothing that can really soften the sensation of being stabbed and shredded from within. I got out of the subway car alongside the rest of the office and construction workers and somehow managed to walk up the first flight of stairs.
I remember joining the line to get up the escalator. For anyone confused or unfamiliar with the sight of an escalator during the peak hours of the early morning commute in NYC, imagine a throng of blue and white collar workers. Without saying a word, they’ll all start entering, one at a time and will all wordlessly stand on the right side. If you’re one of those people in a rush, you’ll walk up the left side of the escalator.
This was also routine, and so long as no one did anything out of the ordinary then they were left alone.
Unfortunately, my body didn’t get the memo because I felt my knees hit the ground before I even realized my legs had given out in the first place. I was literally three streets away from my goal and that was the mantra in my head that managed to propel me off the ground and onto the moving stairs. At this point I slumped over the railing in an attempt to keep myself upright, and my energy is waning. That’s when a good samaritan came up to me and checked if I was okay.
I remember staring at this concerned woman, her words too muffled for me to hear because of the unending tinnitus that came from the extreme pain. I apparently looked so terrible right then that I remember that she hung up on her business call and with the assistance of two other commuters they got me out of the escalator.
Needless to say, I didn’t make it to work that day. An ambulance was called for me, and two firefighters had to carry me on a stretcher up the rest of the way out of the station.
More than fourteen hours later, I was told the usual spiel by the slew of attending doctors that “there’s nothing we can do, it already burst.” I prescribed some heavy duty pain killers that I didn’t want and then I was discharged.
If it had just been that experience at the hospital, I probably would’ve just continued what I was doing for years.
Instead, I have blurry memories of a concerned face, asking if I was okay while I clung to an escalator railing for dear life. One thing one must know about hard core New Yorkers, or those who regularly frequent the city for work. They’re not oblivious – they’re just really good at keeping to themselves and ignoring the regular nonsense that goes on around them for the sake of their sanity or privacy.
What I thought of as “no big deal” ended up with the Brooklyn bound E train getting delayed by 30 minutes, a disrupted commute for hundreds (if not thousands) of people, and my bodily fluids dropping in the middle of a very busy subway station. I remember telling that same woman who corralled me up the escalator, in some pain addled way that “I’m fine.” She looked at me over her glasses with a look that clearly outed her as a seasoned member of some corporate upper management and decisively told me that “no, you are not fine.”
It was in that station, my trousers soiled and barely able to string together a functional sentence thanks to the aftershocks of pain, that I realized she was right. I really wasn’t fine. Just because I had gotten familiar with the pain doesn’t mean that it still wasn’t still excruciating. I had let myself believe that it was just something to deal with, similarly to period cramps.
Except, the same thing applies to period cramps. An improved and exhaustive pain tolerance doesn’t mean that it’s not still painful. It just means that we’ve learned to ignore the screeching alarms our bodies have equipped us with. Those signs are there for a reason, and while it may not be possible to attend to the primary issue right when it happens, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address it when everything has calmed down.
At Best Medical Acupuncture Clinic, Dr. Irene has seen and helped hundreds of patients who have suffered from PCOS and Ovarian Cyst complications. If you need a second, third, or another opinion, please feel free to contact us at: (201) 565-1778 or go to our new patient inquiry page for more details.