Sex, Drugs & Endometriosis: Chapter 1

IT’S SO MUCH EFFORT TO GET P#SSY THESE DAYS

The following chapter contains descriptions that may not be suitable for younger readers, including sexual content, suicide, and recreational drug use. Reader discretion is advised.

Written by Maia Leggott

My longest romantic relationship lasted six years. We met working at a restaurant opening on the Halifax waterfront; he in chef whites, a blue bandana and cutoff jean shorts that revealed the sexiest legs I’d ever seen.

The first time I saw him behind the line I told the server beside me that I was going to sit on his face. I did.

And me, my ass zipped so tightly into black high-waisted American Apparel riding pants that you could bounce a toonie off of it.

The sex was outrageously hot — that’ll happen when one of you is cheating and one of you is the mistress and you’re both working long, stressful hours at a brand new restaurant making tons of cash and spending all of your free time drinking, partying, and experimenting with cocaine.

I’d only tried it twice before I met him, but I was grateful for the welcome numbness on Valentine’s Day when we lost a thumb-sized blue silicone butt plug inside me. If your butt plug has a loop for your finger, kids - DON’T. EVER. LET GO OF IT. Better yet, get one that has a large, wide, flat surface that can’t get sucked in with the convulsive contractions of seventeen orgasms. And if you can’t do either of those, make sure the person you’re with is ready to go digging. Carefully.

That night went down in our relationship history books. I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t one of the reasons we stayed together for six years.

Yes, the sex was great. We’d laugh, eat donairs in bed, drink, fuck, do blow, go out to eat, fuck some more, and lie to our friends. So of course we decided to move halfway across the country after six months of this. Was there a term for trauma bonding in 2014?

~

Our new life in Toronto planted the stable seeds of friendship and love we’d been missing. It was the start of one of the longest periods of stability I’d had in my near-three decades. We had so much fun together - concerts, hikes, camping, kitchen dance parties, a kickass Calvin & Hobbes Halloween costume - and he taught me a lot about support and commitment. But I soon learned that stability and activities did not equal happiness.

I’d been transplanted into the life he’d left behind when he moved to Halifax with his ex ten months prior. (You know, the one he cheated on. With me).

“I left Toronto with one girlfriend, and came back with another!” He’d joke over and over and over as he introduced me to his friends, family and work buddies.

“Yep, he decided to trade up,” became my standard reply.

I was the cookie cutter girlfriend that he brought back to the life he never stopped talking about for the wretched months he had to endure maritime living. I felt chosen when really I was just there.

Suddenly I existed in a new place, with new friends, new jobs, and the opportunity to become anyone I wanted.

None of them knew me, the insecurities, the past follies, the mistakes I made over and over and over, never learning. But I was branded His Girlfriend, not a Whole Person Of My Own, but someone who now had a role to fill as Replacement Who Doesn’t Mess with Status Quo.

When I found myself in an emergency department that November, I knew that would be impossible.

I’d been feeling piercing pain deep in my pelvis on the right side when I peed - or pooped, or had sex, or moved really - for days, definitely a week by then, maybe longer.

It’s hard to say when looking back on your life through pain-tinted glasses. It all melts into an amorphous blob of suffering after a while.

~

I’d been off the pill for a few months at that point; finally realizing after 13 years on hormones that they were causing more harm than good. The new progestin-only option I’d been given made me miserable as fuck, bleed for two months straight, and physically unable to do much beyond complain, get headaches, and dry heave.

Discovering the return of my endometriosis - a large chocolate cyst on my ovary was the source of my piercing pain - was a shock, but not a surprise given how I’d sobbed during the knife-like transvaginal ultrasound. I was diagnosed with endometriosis five years prior through laparoscopic surgery after 12 years of being dismissed for my symptoms. I discovered this mysterious illness in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows elsewhere in the body, in an article in Glamour magazine. It detailed all of the symptoms I’d been experiencing since my first period - severe pain, nausea, gastrointestinal issues, and (most terrifyingly to my Good Catholic Girl sensibilities) infertility. I took the magazine to my doctor and said, “Hi, I think I have this, how do we fix it?”

I was right. But ‘fixing’ it was complicated.

Over the months post-ultrasound assault, I gained 50 pounds and was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid, something I later learned is a common reaction to stopping hormonal birth control after a long period of time. I was never not in pain and I felt like a huge burden on everyone around me who had to deal with my flakiness and constant disappearing. My mental health disintegrated and I tried to kill myself with the morphine prescription they’d given me in the ED.

I quit my job, lost some friends, told no one about the attempt to end my life, hermited like a crab, stopped having sex entirely, and let him tell me I’d changed; that I couldn’t spend my life wallowing about being chronically ill on the couch making myself a victim because I had to be a productive member of society and contribute by working.

Soon I had my second surgery, where they removed lots of pelvic endo, and found some more hiding in my ribcage that’s still there. That was the only medical appointment he ever came to with me.

~

I wanted him to sleep with other people pretty quickly after our sex life bottomed out. I knew from our cocaine-fueled threesomes and an orgy in Panama before we met that I liked to share. Why shouldn’t he be able to go out, get his dick wet, and then come home and tell me about it so I could get mind-fucked by osmosis?

But every time I suggested it, he wavered. There were many excuses:

“It’s so much effort to get pussy. That’s why I’m in a relationship!”

“But I have you, I don’t want to be with anyone else.”

“I’m too lazy to cheat on you.”

He wasn’t wrong about the sex fizzling. I let it. We both let it, him much more begrudgingly so. Why else do you get into a relationship if not for regular sex? Forget an emotional connection, honest communication or shared values.

We had fights upon fights that I now realize was our incompatibility screaming to be severed, but one in particular is burned into my brain.

He was sitting on our orange couch under the window one Saturday morning. I think we were supposed to meet friends in the park later, but instead I was going back and forth to the bathroom with food poisoning and a flare-up. 

“It’s always fucking something with you!” he said. “I can’t even remember the last time we had sex!”

Because that’s what I’m worried about when, on top of soul-destroying pelvic pain, I’m alternating between pissing out my butt and puking my guts into the same toilet I’d curled around when I swallowed those morphine pills before promptly forcing them back up in fear.

Sure, let’s fuck baby.

It’s not like the thought of putting anything inside me makes my pelvic floor clench tighter than a Gringotts vault.

I’ll spit on it with the pre-vomit saliva filling my mouth, cool?

I froze under an avalanche of failed sexpectations: the Europe trip where we were intimate barely once in 3 weeks; every cathartic post-orgasm sob that made him back away from me in fear; the feelings of utter worthlessness when he’d get that hopeful glint in his eye only for it to disappear with the realization that it wasn’t happening - again.

How do I tell him that I don’t even recognize myself?

That I’ve avoided taking photos or looking in the mirror as much as possible because illness and hormones turned me into someone my dementia-riddled Nanna didn’t even recognize at Christmas because “I’d put on so much weight.”

That seeing our friends or meeting new people gave me crippling anxiety because I didn’t feel like they were meeting the real me, the me whose chronic illness wasn’t rebounding from over a decade of masking it with synthetic hormones, who didn’t suddenly view her sexuality as disposable, who didn’t tie her worth as a human being to her ability to work or find someone to marry and impregnate her. Which was probably not even possible, because fucking endometriosis.

I wanted him to decide for himself that he didn’t want this life; I tried to tell him it’s not going to change, that this is life with endometriosis and that he will always have an out. I could never ask him to live this way forever.

But he was a Good Man who would never abandon a Sick Woman, what would people think? Our give-and-take of gaslighting, emotional abuse and resentment would have to do.

Plus, it’s so much effort to get pussy these days.

~

So he cared for me and sacrificed for me and made concessions for me and never let me forget it. If I felt good enough to go for a walk but not good enough to have sex it had to be a choice, and I usually chose wrong. He supported my use of medical cannabis until it was more convenient for me to be a drug addict that was ruining his life. 

We talked about opening up our relationship to see if that sparked anything in either of us, and because I still desperately wanted him to get good and fucked in a way that I just couldn’t provide. All that did was breed insecurity, jealousy, and control issues, which finally pushed us to admit we wanted different things. I wanted to explore queerness on my own terms; he saw it as a guarantee of regular threesomes.

Then, a new endo specialist told me I could either get pregnant in an attempt to ‘cure’ my endo, or have a hysterectomy if I wasn’t planning on filling my uterus. To have it stated so plainly—“Use it or lose it.”—was shocking, even if it wasn’t the first time I’d been told that. I was so fucking angry, and sick of these pathetic attempts to manage my incurable illness.

It forced us to have “The Kid Conversation,” which we’d had on and off over the years. I was coming to the realization that a lifetime of paralyzing fear of pregnancy and motherhood meant perhaps I didn’t actually want to bear a child and become a mother. How the hell would I even take care of a kid when taking care of myself is a full-time job? I sensed that he was agreeing with what I wanted in some half-assed efforts to salvage the relationship - because finding a new one took so much gosh darn work.

Then, the world was plunged into a pandemic. He lost his job, I got busier than ever, and we both fell into the collective depression sweeping the globe - we just happened to fall away from each other. We fought some more, had some epic sex, yelled a lot, and both said some incredibly hurtful things before he went to his parents’ for the night to cool down and never came back. Except to get his things. He met his fiancée six days later.

Imagine my shock one Sunday morning, an unspecified length of time after our mutual-and-loving-turned-explosive-and-cruel breakup, when after a late period and a week of desperately sore nipples, pelvic pain, and morning sickness I peed on a stick and two violent magenta streaks appeared like a bullet.

I was pregnant.