Years and years is a fragmented and intimate piece of creative memoir about the long, invalidating process of getting an endometriosis diagnosis, about women’s pain, about the bittersweetness of having the language to describe traumatic experiences.

I am eleven years old when the blood comes for the first time, pale red and not yet itself. My stepmum is in the loungeroom watching TV and I cry when I tell her, a guilty confession for something I haven’t done. She nods, tells me to wait for her in my bedroom, and joins me carrying a handful of maxi pads from my stepsister’s cupboard. Wordlessly, she teaches me how to put a pad on the inside of my underwear, long end at the back.

 I am twelve when the cramps start. None of my friends bleed for nine days and none of them soak through pads like wet dishcloths or wear denim shorts under their woollen school skirts because denim is thicker and won’t soak through. I learn to dab, not scrub, use cold water, not hot, to get blood out of the mattress and sheets.

I am thirteen and a regular in the antiseptic scented sick bay of my high school. I walk to the front desk, hinged like a bobby pin bent all the way back because it’s too painful to stand up straight. The office ladies, grey-streaked bobs and thin glasses’ frames, switch into their choreographed routine. One guides me gently to the sick bay with a heat pack, two Panadol and a plastic cup of water; the other calls home, wakes my dad, tells him it’s happened again and can he please come and get me. I feel guilty knowing he will be tired at work again tonight.

I am fourteen when I am prescribed Ponstan by my family’s GP, an anti-inflammatory that is supposed to work for period pain. Because period pain is all it is and period pain is normal and unfortunately just happens to some of us. It does nothing to lessen the blood that pours from my body each month and works little to stop the breathless contracting of my insides.

I am fifteen when the pain takes me to the emergency room for the first time. In the back of my dad’s Ford Falcon on a Sunday afternoon I throw up twice as he pushes the speed limit to the Northern Hospital. The emergency department is full, so I wait three hours to be seen, dazed, nauseous, a churning pain through my back, my lower abdomen, my thighs. They tell me they can’t see anything wrong and send me home with Endone and a sense of futility.

I am sixteen when I am back in the GP’s office telling him that the Ponstan doesn’t work. He tells me you’re not taking it correctly, you have to take it 48 hours before your period starts but not for more than four days at a time. My period is irregular, I don’t know when it’s 48 hours away, I tell him, and he says you just have to try. He also writes a prescription for Panadeine Forte, for emergencies only, he says with earnestness. Every month is an emergency. 

I am seventeen when, after multiple spotless ultrasounds, the family GP suggests birth control to try and stop the pain. He gives me a free three-month supply of the pill. It does not stop the pain, but it does make me depressed and sends my emotional peaks and troughs beyond any manageable equilibrium. I don’t finish the three packets.  

I am eighteen and sitting in a disused storeroom at my retail job in a city department store because the building has seven floors but no first aid room. My body shakes violently from the pain. The two men who manage the floor are stressed and useless in the face of a woman’s bodily dysfunction. A serious woman from another floor, who I have never met before and will never meet again, hovers around me indifferent to this inconvenience in her day. My partner has to leave work to drive me to the Royal Women’s, where I throw up from the pain three times before I’m seen by a doctor. They give me Endone, put me on the public waiting list for the women’s health clinic (two years, minimum) and tell me they can’t do anything more when they send me home. 

I am nineteen when I hear the word endometriosis for the first time. I have moved just south of the Yarra and my new GP is a woman, British and chatty and resolute, and I hope she might be able to help. It comes after I return from an overseas trip, during which I am in so much pain that I miss a flight from Bordeaux to Barcelona. The airport medics give me morphine, let me lie down for half an hour, and charge me a hundred and sixty Euro.

I am twenty when, tired of the pain, of missing classes at uni and shifts at multiple part time jobs, of Implanons and different brands of the pill, of codeine nausea, of endless months on the public health waiting list, I save $350 and see a specialist in Carlton. In her office, I cry when she tells me yes, it sounds like endo, yes, surgery could help, yes, she can get me in at the Women’s for surgery in three months’ time.

I am twenty-one when I am finally, formally, diagnosed with endometriosis, after a laparoscopic surgery where they scrape the violent tissue from my insides. I am relieved to have an identity for the disease that has burned through my body for more than a decade.

But there is something else, too, a sense of sadness and of grief for myself, that this is what it is and this is how it will be for the rest of my life.