In her own words

I was fourteen the first time I fainted from period pain. My mother, who had endured the same, held my hand and told me the women in our family were built to carry things. I believed her, because she was the strongest person I knew. So I carried it — through matric exams written on painkillers, through university, through the first years of a career where I kept a hot water bottle hidden under my desk.

The word that changed everything was spoken almost casually, by a locum doctor I had never met before and have never seen since. She looked at my file, then at me, and said: “Has anyone ever investigated you for endometriosis?” No one had. Twelve years of appointments, and no one had.

Diagnosis wasn't a happy ending — it was a beginning. Surgery, medication decisions, learning what my body needed instead of what I demanded from it. But the deepest change was in my own voice. I stopped saying “it's probably nothing”. I started keeping notes, asking for referrals, bringing questions written down so pain couldn't scatter them.

To the woman reading this on the bathroom floor at work, breathing through a wave of it: you are not weak, you are not dramatic, and you are not alone. Pain is information. Find someone who will read it with you.

My son was born healthy on a Tuesday morning, and everyone said I was blessed, and I was. That is the trap of it — I was blessed, and I was also drowning, and I did not believe both things were allowed to be true at once.

The visitors came with gifts and left with photographs. Everyone asked about the baby. His weight, his sleep, his feeding. Nobody asked about me, and I learned to volunteer nothing. Inside, a grey fog was thickening. I loved my son with a fierceness that frightened me, and yet I felt nothing when I looked at my own face in the mirror. I remember thinking: I have gone missing, and no one has noticed.

It was a nurse at his three-month check who noticed. She asked the questions on her form, then put the form down and asked them again with her eyes. I cried for the first time in twelve weeks. She did not flinch. She said: “This is common. It is treatable. It is not your fault.” Three sentences. I still know them by heart.

Therapy helped. Medication helped. My sister moving in for a month helped. Slowly, the woman in the mirror came back — changed, softer in some places and harder in others. My son is three now. When I visit new mothers, I hold the baby second. First, I look at her, and I ask: “And how are you — really?”

The diagnosis took eleven minutes. I timed it, later, in my memory: an ultrasound, a printout, the words polycystic ovary syndrome, and a sentence about my future fertility delivered with all the tenderness of a bus timetable. I was nineteen. I went home and grieved children I had not even decided I wanted.

For years, PCOS was the lens over everything. Every skipped period was a verdict. Every unwanted hair was an accusation. Diet after diet promised to fix me, and every one of them broke something else instead — mostly my relationship with mirrors and with food.

The turning point was not a treatment. It was an endocrinologist who began our first appointment with: “Tell me what you understand about your condition,” and then gently, over an hour, replaced my fears with mechanisms. Insulin. Androgens. Ovulation. Things that could be measured, influenced, managed. She was the first person to tell me that most women with PCOS have families, if and when they choose to.

I am thirty-one now. My cycles are regular-ish, my blood work is good, and whether I have children remains my decision, not my diagnosis's. PCOS is a chapter in my story — a long one, honestly — but I hold the pen.

My mother never said the word menopause. It arrived in her life the way weather arrives — endured, unnamed, discussed only in sighs. So when my own change began at fifty, I had a choice: inherit the silence, or break it.

I broke it, loudly and a little ridiculously, by joining a running club. I could not run four hundred metres. I was hot-flushing, sleeping badly, and carrying a body that felt suddenly unfamiliar. The younger women were kind; the two other women my age were revelatory. We named everything, out loud, between breaths. Night sweats. Brain fog. The strange grief of it, and the strange freedom too.

I learned to lift weights because a physiotherapist in the club insisted bones my age needed it. I learned about hormone therapy from an actual doctor instead of a decades-old rumour, and made my own informed choice. I learned that my finishing pace matters less than the fact of my feet still striking the ground.

The half marathon took me two hours and fifty-one minutes. My periods ended somewhere in week six of training, quietly, without ceremony. I crossed both finish lines the same way: sweating, laughing, surrounded by women, and utterly unashamed. This season of life is not a diminishment. It is a distance event, and I intend to run all of it.