Grieving my mortal shell

On a moody grey afternoon, somewhere miles away from what I knew as home, I sat in my car. I was crying, fresh off a medical appointment. I’d known something was wrong for a long time, and I’d had a fight and then some to get to this point. After roughly a decade of pleading with healthcare professionals that something was wrong with me, I’d been diagnosed with endometriosis.

Endometriosis, often shortened to endo, is a condition in which tissue grows outside of the uterus. It can grow in all sorts of places, like on the ovaries or fallopian tubes, but it can also grow on organs like the bowel and bladder. It’s an incredibly painful, frightening condition that can cause complications, and features lots of nasty characters, like cysts and intense irregular bleeding. It also causes severe fatigue, nausea, chronic bloating, and difficulty getting pregnant. As horrible as the condition itself is, getting diagnosed can be particularly tricky, and many people wind up like myself, spending years fighting against medical professionals telling us there’s nothing wrong whilst our bodies rip themselves apart from the inside.

One of the key difficulties I faced after getting the diagnosis was processing the diagnosis; one of the most reliable ways I’ve found to process big news is to play games. It gives me time to relax my nervous system, and focus on a task whilst my subconscious gets to work on the bigger issues. Obviously, I do try other things too, but looking up more about it didn’t really help. It did make me feel some comfort that what I had been experiencing was real, though, and not just something I’d made up. Like many people who deal with health issues, I had been repeatedly convinced it was something that was just in my head, so it was somewhat reassuring to know it wasn’t. A few nights of googling my diagnosis wasn’t enough for me to start facing the bigger parts of what it meant for me, though. That job would be tackled by a game: Mortal Shell 2.