After years of pain and fatigue,novelist Hilary Mantel was diagnosed with endometriosis, a disease so diminutive understood, and she was offered psychiatric treatmentThe weekend I first began to bleed,my family had just moved house. The furniture was shrouded, the mood was furious and purposive; we were redecorating, or soaking and scraping off wallpaper,layer after layer of it: regency stripes, faded sepia vistas and blown roses. My mother kept me up to the task, or lugging buckets of water and pushing around a yard brush. Exercise was ample for menstrual pain,she thought. As the paper dropped in curls to the floorboards, I would contain liked to drop and curl up too; as I bled, and sweated and shook,something was scraping and chiselling, urgently, and inside my body. I felt - and I was right - that I was leaving normal life behind. The rest of the family were in a lively DIY commercial,while I had slid away from them into an after-midnight horror film. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com