At twenty one years old, after being with the same gynaecologist for eight years they decided it was time to go in for a laparoscopy. As suspected, thanks to my mothers history; endometriosis was the cause of agonising menstruation and all the lovely symptoms that go with it. From the time of that diagnosis every medical professional who learned that I have the disease would tell me that I should ‘have children yesterday.’

I have always had in my mind that I won’t have children until I’m married. I was raised in a relatively normal family structure, so my children deserve the same. Armed with the knowledge that the longer I leave having children, the more I risk being unable to do it naturally, Brent took advantage of the vulnerable state I was in and I no longer had the contraceptive pill.

At the time, my life in general was fairly stressful and they say menstruation can stop due to stress. They also say that you can feel when an embryo embeds itself in to your uterus. After an unusual sudden feeling in my uterus one day and missing a period, I took a home pregnancy test. It was negative. I had agonising pelvic pain for almost six weeks, it would drop me to the floor. However, after a third negative pregnancy test, all different brands, with the instructions followed meticulously, no morning sickness, and my medical history I had to put it down to stress from my tumultuous relationship or endometriosis.

I had been back in the safety of my parental home for two weeks when I just couldn’t handle the pain any longer so I went to see my doctor. He seemed to agree with me that perhaps I’d contracted an STD from Brent as “pregnancy isn’t painful” but for good measure he added an hCG ‘pregnancy hormone’ blood test into the mix. I had the bloods taken that afternoon and was given a container for a urine sample to bring back the next morning.

I have been going to the same doctor since the day I was born so I know his medical secretaries fairly well. When I walked in the next morning with the sample and she told me the doctor wanted to see me and asked me to wait a moment, I knew exactly why he wanted to see me. I was sitting there with every imaginable swear word going through my mind because I knew that results for STDs would take more than 12 hours to process. The only thing that could have returned results so quickly, was hCG.

My doctor called me in to his office, I sat there as he calmly told me I was pregnant and we went over the next steps. He gave me a referral for routine pregnancy blood tests and I went home.

My mother and I have always been fairly close, but I think even someone who’d never met me would have seen how white I was when I walked back into that house. She was in the kitchen, I stood at the bench and without words she asked what was wrong and all I could say was ‘I’m pregnant.’ Just like my doctor and I, she was shocked because ‘pregnancy isn’t painful’.

Pregnancy isn’t supposed to be painful but my memories, memories that I’ll share another time, they are painful, more now than they have been in a long time.