Marisa
Marisa (she/her) lives in Frankfurt and Berlin and has battled with chronic illnesses since childhood. Latest achievement is ME/CFS due to Covid 19. Has always used writing to stay more or less sane. Has an academic background in philosophy, history and social sciences. Currently tries to fight patriarchy from bed and thinks about what to do with the rest of life – or what’s left of it.
Evidence Enough
Menstruating means to be regularly thrown back on what you are not: a man. And thus, it is still a medical mystery to many doctors, so it seems.
When I first experienced symptoms of Long Covid, it was right after my menstruation. I recovered from most of it.
When I got infected a second time, I felt like shit again, exactly on the day my menstruation started.
The third time, I again started symptoms on the first day of menstruation. All that, after I climbed out of the hole of not functioning two times, only to stumble in it again. Currently, I remain at the bottom of said third hole, and they get deeper every fucking time.
For four years now, I have raised this pattern of menstruating into hell with several doctors, and none could explain it; some didn’t even find it interesting. Even my gynecologist shrugged.
Long Covid is the second chronic disease I have, where 80 percent of the affected are women. The first one, scoliosis, was diagnosed at 11. Nobody could tell me why I have it, and being raised catholic, I often asked God, “Why me“. In the end, there was the probability that I had done something wrong, that I had inflicted it upon myself because I was a bad person. I should have asked „why women“, but being thrown back on the fragility of my body once a month didn’t start until 13. I did not count myself as something other than human at that time. Boy, was I wrong.
Before I got Long Covid, I could forget how it is to menstruate for the majority of days. The power of repression is strong in this one. But since I got sicker, everything cycles around an organ I never asked for or wanted. I don’t want to bear children; I know my body couldn’t bear it, and I never felt the need to. Or how do you develop the need for a child when everybody tells you since the age of 11 that it could become a problem for your body? And why the fuck would you tell that to a child at all!?
For me, being a sick girl meant no more hopping on bouncy castles, no more jumping down the last steps of stairs, no more movements without thinking about every fucking step and its consequences before. In a lot of ways, it was a hardcore training in behaving like a fucking woman in this fucking society – the ultimate form of self-control.
And then, at 12 I had to give up movement in my upper body – physically, because that was the year I got my first medical corset. The pain of wearing that shit is another story entirely. And bearing pain is another really great skill you learn in female socialization.
I learned the meaning of the word idiopathic when I was 11. That was my diagnosis: idiopathic scoliosis – which means: nobody knows the fuck where it came from or what the trigger is.
Later, at 16, I was still on the search for the reason I got scoliosis, but now the internet was at hand. And I found a clue that hadn’t been mentioned to me before: female hormones, which probably led to connective tissue being softened in puberty, thus failing to support the spine.
At that time, my spine had worsened from a new type of corset made by a man using mostly girls as his experiments for his medical legacy.
Around that time, my depression began, unnoticed until I cried out for therapy years later.
Interestingly, depression in women can stay unnoticed more often till death do us part, as women tend to inflict self-harm rather than lashing out. Nobody the fuck noticed when I was wearing long sleeves in PE. Or the pile of hair I had ripped out that was lying under my chair at the end of a school period.
So, here I am, once again. I am definitely torn into pieces.
And once again, the search for the cause of my many ailments leads to female hormones. But we wouldn’t live in fucking patriarchy if any doctor would raise a brow when I tell them that my symptoms worsen severely in the second half of my cycle.
What’s a girl supposed to do?
Will consult private specialist soon, hope it’s not too expensive, and that I will get some fucking answers. If I had the energy, I would get that whole shit ripped out. Maybe then I could return to the land of the living, as could all my fellow sick sisters. We could join again in the fight against patriarchy, which has not only let us down as women, but as sick women! Because it is far easier to disable women physically than to teach them how to behave! Like a machine, just like pushing the off button, but through neglecting, or throwing the word idiopathic around, shrugging shoulders, scratching heads and beards, and in the end saying „Could be related, but sadly there is no evidence“.
No fucking evidence?! How about millions of women? Evidence enough?!
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