I spent today in a stupor... Last night, my MRI results came back my disease is worse than I thought The space between my uterus and rectum is almost completely sealed shut with scar tissue. Normally, this is an open pocket. My uterus wall is the most affected… the endometriosis has grown all the way through the muscle wall, extending up to the top of the uterus. My rectum and lower colon are tethered… pulled and stuck by adhesions where they meet. Inside, I am twisted, contorted, scarred. Earlier this week I was on the phone with my mum, asking her about her own previous menstrual cycles. I asked questions that no one had ever asked her… did she also have pain while defecating? Just how painful were her periods? A memory of my 13th birthday comes back… me finding her curled up on the couch, doubled over in pain. I concluded that she, too, probably had endo. She tried to explain that ‘back then’ there just “wasn’t that much attention on female health”. Funny, this is a line I still say today. I thought about my future daughter… would she be repeating the same line in 30 years? Oh.. can I even have a daughter? Maybe not. Infertility affects 30 to 50% of women with endometriosis. My endo is likely stage 4 (the worst stage). There’s so much to say on this topic… For now, all I know is this: I have a slow-growing disease, which is very very burdensome to diagnose, and has been increasingly distorting my body for 8 years… It affects 1 in 10 women, likely more. 190 million people. And yet, most people don’t know about it. So.. what do we do now? Honestly, tonight, idk. If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have told you all about our grand plan to cure my endo. Bryan and I have been cooking up a strategy with scientists around the world. But my results came back so much worse than I thought. Tomorrow I am sure I will wake up, dust off the despair, and get back to work. The usual treatments (hormonal suppression and surgery) don’t cut it. Both suck. And neither is a cure. So, tomorrow, we’ll see what else is possible. But tonight I grieve with millions of women.