I TOLD you I was sick.

(I could say something flip like "that'll be my epitaph", haha. But it's just not funny right now.)
So, I haven't been feeling well. For about 2 or 3 years. It started with a rolling, oogy feeling in my tummy accompanied by a pain in my upper right abdomen. I went to my regular FP doctor, Dr. SpeedyArmyGuy, whom I love. He always listens and is very definitive with his diagnoses.
"It's your gall bladder. Let's get an ultrasound."
It wasn't my gall bladder. Just to be sure, he ordered a Hydroscan, which is an hours-long ordeal with much fasting beforehand and then having to lie very still in a scanner while gall-bladder-contracting-stuff is pumped into your veins.
Nothing.
The pain went away for a while.
Then it came back. This time Dr. SpeedyArmyGuy scheduled an endoscopy with a gastroenterologist friend of his. I talked to Dr. GI for about 2 minutes before he taped an O-ring in my mouth (making me feel ludicrously like a blow-up doll), knocked me out and stuck a camera down my gullet. While he was in there, he took pictures and nicked a chunk of my duodenum for a trophy.
Nothing.
It took 3 months to get in to see this gastroenterologist for a follow-up office visit. When I did, he joked that maybe I was faking it. Haha.
I went on a gluten-free diet and decided to shut the hell up about it for a year. I would be fine. I would make myself be fine.
Then I started having increasingly crazy PMS. For 2 weeks of every month, I would be exhausted, brain-dead, moody like you wouldn't believe, and felt like I had a pair of molten-lead bowling balls strapped to my chest. Then I would be okay for 2 weeks, would apologize to my family for being a bitch and to everyone else for being a flake, and would try to get caught up.
And the pain came back, bigger, more widespread and I kind of wanted to throw up a lot. I called Dr. GI. He ordered a full abdominal CAT scan. Right before this scan, I spent an AWESOME weekend water-skiing and wake surfing with some wonderful friends in a lake surrounded by cows. I might have swallowed some water. I know some water got into at least 2 orifices when I wrecked spectacularly while slalom skiing. It was brilliant. Then I came home, had the scan (fasting for a day, drinking a gallon of barium and then lying very still in a big machine again), and the next day started barfing and...well...the other thing that goes with barfing, only the other end. Ahem. Called Dr. SpeedyArmyGuy, who chewed me out for swallowing lake water and diagnosed me with giardia. Between talking with him and a friend of mine whose father is a GI doc, we started to think that maybe I had had a chronic giardia infection all along. Okay! A diagnosis! A treatment! Yes! Dr. GI did not take the news well and basically told me not to call his office anymore. Well, okay, I guess. Now I can move on and focus on this fucking PMS.
In the midst of the gut stuff, I had timidly asked my Gyno doc, twice at annual exams, if she could maybe check my ovaries, just to make sure that everything down there was okay and wasn't contributing to this gut stuff and the PMS. She said they felt fine. And if I wasn't going to take birth control pills, she couldn't help me. The pills made the PMS worse, I told her. She sighed and told me I was fine, it was nothing to do with anything down there and she wasn't going to test my ovaries because false positives are common and just not something she wanted to deal with. I was fine.

Yes.

I was fine.

Or not. But I decided, again, to just shut up. Maybe I was fine. Maybe I was faking it and didn't even know I was faking it. Maybe I was just that much of an attention whore.

Yes. I was fine.

Flash forward to March of this year. Everything started getting worse. The pain, the PMS. I read up on bioidentical hormones, found a (very expensive, non-insurance covered) Women's Health CNM. She made me spit into a handful of vials, sent them off for testing and then declared I was almost maybe peri-menopausal. It was something. So she gave me some (also very expensive) progesterone pills and cream and I dutifully used it.
I also saw a new GI doc, who was and is flummoxed and determined but decided to start by clearing my whole system and re-biotizing it. Great. I felt okay for 2 weeks. Then not. Really really not.
A month ago I got a postcard, randomly, for an ObGyn clinic specializing in "pelvic problems". I needed an annual poking and prodding and wasn't going back to the bitch who made me feel bad for asking if she could help me, so I scheduled an appointment.

Have you ever met one of those people who just...listens? And cares? And validates you, even when you come to them defensive and exhausted and at the end of a rapidly fraying rope? Yeah. He got it. He did the poking and prodding, then told me he would do every test that he thought might, at least, rule out anything wrong down there.
I cried. In front of him.

(Any men reading this might want to skip the next few paragraphs. Just sayin')

So yesterday I saw him in his ultrasound and super-poking lab office. He cranked open my uterus and poked it. That does NOT feel pleasant. At all. Then he wheeled over an ultrasound machine with a wand that he actually put an actual condom on. After I swallowed my humiliation and we giggled about it, he turned on the ultrasound and...started taking pictures of my inside. It took exactly 2 seconds before he said,
"Wow. Well, there you go. There's your problem."
On the screen was a big black ball. The size of a baseball. 700 cubic centimeters. (That's more than half a liter. A water bottle.)

I have a cyst on my ovary that would make a decent water balloon. It's making everything hurt just by being where it isn't supposed to be, and fucking up my hormones enough that my gut is discombobulated and my PMS is crazy.
I cried, again, in front of him. That insane laughing cry that just blasts out and you can't stop it. He hugged me. And I cried some more.

Because after 2 years of being sick, having my mental state and honesty questioned, tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary and uncomfortable and humiliating tests, being an emotional wreck and a physical noodle, it's going to be over.

He's taking it out on Tuesday. With a robot!

And then I'll be fine.

Yep.

Fine.