Poems

Still, you want more.

All around me are happy healthy people.

All around me are doctors.
Doctors that don’t listen to what ails me.
Doctors who tell me to ‘learn to manage.’

All around me are people.
People who are unable to console me.
People who are give up on me for being sick.

All around me are medications.
Medications to treat what ails me.
Medications that I am accused of abusing.

Most days are endless and filled with sorrow.
While I smile brightly and push.
I push until I can push no more.

I cry often in the shower to lighten the load of my family.
The more they don’t know the better.
The more I can fake it the happier they are.

I have done everything they ask and they still ask more.
Take this pill, take this shot, and wear this patch.
Give us your uterus, give us your fallopian tubes.
Give us your ovaries, give us your cervix.
Give us your womanhood.

It is never enough.
Give us your appendix.

Give it 6 weeks to heal.

Give it a try.

Give it your all.

Give it all of you.

It devours you from the inside out.

The disease trumps everything.

You are alone and you are empty.

Some days it seems I am an outsider, looking at my life.
So hard to believe this is it.

This is not what I dreamed.
Why is this happening to me?
Why is this happening to anyone?

I feel the edge of tears in my eyes.
I do not let them fall.

I can not sleep.
I take the pills the suggest.
I still can not sleep.

I do everything that is asked of me.
Why do my doctors not do the same?

I play their games but I am left without a team.
  By, Barbara Jacobs (sorry I am not a writer just a sufferer)

Dear Doctor

By Barbara Jacobs

Please do not tell me one more time I am too young.  Each time these words are spoken I think of what has passed. I, dear friend, lost my youth in a disease that many people have never heard of.

Do not patronize me or tell me things will look up, this is a promise you cannot keep.
Please do not give me one more medications to ease my mind. I do not need a bandaid, I need a cure.

What do you do to move forward when one third of your life is spent in illness, pain and removal of organs?  What makes you accept that you cannot get back the years or piece of you that have been discarded.

Forced to listen to doctors tell you how to cure yourself. It is simple they say just have a baby. Well dear doctor I beg of you to learn more than what you say, it is simply not true. Those that are blessed to have children and still suffer left with guilt and sorrow. To live with the fear that you could not give your children enough of what they need. To live with the fear that one day your daughter will suffer your fate.

Many doctors and people believe if you simply remove the uterus, the essence of my womanhood, it will cure me. What do you say to the woman who believed you and are still in pain or increased pain after you have taken something you cannot give back? The common answer, let’s take more organs out! What, dear doctor, will you do when I have no more organs for you to take from my torn and broken body? Then we are left with the most heartbreaking answer anyone could get “It is all in your head.”

Dear doctor, I ask that you picture the woman you love the most in the world. Do you see her, do you have her in your head? Now tell her the pain will never go away. That her life will never be fully her own, you come up with the words to comfort her and you try to make it okay. Explain to her that you were wrong. I see it is easy to tell me, a mere stranger that I am not really in pain or that you were wrong. That even though I gave up pieces of my body I should just accept it. But again I ask, explain it to a woman you love. Is it as easy as you thought? How does it feel to wipe her tears?

We do not need your uneducated guesses, we need research and a voice. As we rise to bring awareness you need to be leading the way. Please I beg, stop building up walls that make it harder for us to move forward. Please stand beside and fight with us.

Please listen when we say “I have endometriosis and there is NO cure.”

 *I do not mind if you share the poem, just please note me as the author. This poem is protected by copyright laws.