Dealing With Chronic, Unknown Pain

This morning started off pretty okay, with me feeling motivated to get some real work done for a change on the many projects I have encumbered myself with this year. Unfortunately before I even got to eat breakfast I began to feel all too familiar stabbing and cramping pains in my lower abdomen. At first I ignored the pain, thinking it'd subside pretty quickly as it usually does, but not this time.

The pain kept getting worse for the next ten or twenty minutes until I had to admit that it wasn't getting any better. Half walking, half crawling, I made it to the mattress I use as a bed, still, and sank down on it while gritting my teeth in agony. I tried to position myself as comfortably as possible and distract myself by reading some in my current book, but at many points during the hour that I was lying there I had to put away the book because I could barely focus on it through the pain and tears.

This particular time was one of the worst cramps I have felt since the first time I remember from when I was 11 years old and I thought I was dying. It's a raw, unrelenting pain, somewhat like when you have really bad indigestion with hints of kidney stones, but focused on the front of the lower abdomen, descending down to the groin. Though I'm used to pain, I broke down in tears a number of times and was more than grateful when the pain finally subsided after about an hour.

It's been suggested that this monthly abdominal pain is due to some food intolerance (like gluten), but considering the nature of the symptoms, the cyclic occurrence and it happening regardless of whether I have eaten anything at all in the hours before it, it seems quite unlikely that this is the case.

In the end I don't know what this pain entails, just that it's there every month, both numbing and cramping up my abdomen for about a week, and sometimes putting me out of commission for a while, like today. I wasn't at the office today because it's a national holiday here in Germany, but otherwise I would have collapsed at my desk in sheer agony. I'm not looking forward to this happening next week or at any other point in the near future. Because it's embarrassing and because I'm so utterly frustrated because I don't know what this pain is or what could be done about it.

If only there were doctors on this planet who cared about patients, but after a decade of trying to find one, I have given up on such a ridiculous proposition.


Maya