Sunday 26 April 2015

Intersex death row, or: why I'm desperate for answers

One's mortality is something we're all aware of to some extent, but there's nothing like having the prospect of one's imminent death looming in one's future to really motivate one to analyse one's feelings on the subject.

I do not wish to die. I wish to just fix all that's wrong right now and move on with living, never thinking about taking my own life as a way to stop the torturous pain. The question which I get asked a lot is why I don't do just that: accept my body, accept what has happened to me and move on.

Today I'm yet again virtually crippled, with a constant burning pain in my lower right abdomen, a distended abdomen, sharp pains in the groin region, painful hips, a slightly numb right leg and a sensation of severe inflammation in the vaginal region. Add to this feeling of exhaustion, the headaches and a near-complete lack of appetite combined with bouts of nausea, and the question I'd like to counter the original question with is 'how else am I going to know what causes these symptoms, or how to treat them?'.

These symptoms aren't getting better, either. Some of them have been causing me grief on and off over the past decades, with the abdominal pain first striking when I was eleven years old. The sensation of vaginal inflammation started a few years ago and became severely lessened after I began to take the pill, yet for the past months it's back with a vengeance again. With the information I have on the many possible complications - ranging from cancers to sepsis - for an intersex condition like mine, it feels like I was placed on death row many years ago and am just working through the usual appeals in the faint hope that maybe this time the judge will admit my innocence.

As my body is beginning to throw up more and more warning flags in the form of pains and other symptoms, it also raises for me the eerie possibility that it'll be shutting down any moment now. It may have been fighting against infections, tissue intrusions and what not for these past decades, but is now ready to throw in the towel. I cannot say. Not with an absolute refusal by doctors to seriously consider my case.

I can only hope that this new gynaecologist won't be like the others. For the only other thing I can seemingly do is pray that I won't die this year or soon after.

Please don't let me die...


Maya

1 comment:

ChopraManish said...

oh god. you are in real pain. i really don`t know what to say which will make you feel better. I have anxiety disorder which had produced lot of acid in my stomach. But with medicine, that problem is gone. I sill remember that pain. I hope you will be fine too.