Question Marks

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

The question everyone asks after is, “How are you doing!?”

My broken heart beats back “I’m-so sad-so sad-so tired-so tired”, but I swallow those broken beats, and grab for my halfhearted “Oh-I’m-ok-thanks-for-asking” masked reply and put that on instead.

It’s just easier.

I had an answer. I had a name for my pain. After years of trying everything to tame the angsty question marks rattling around in my head, I finally got to belong to a club. I found comfort and comradery, I had fellow sisters soldiering on against this pain too.

Then…I got kicked out of the club.

Pathology. Benign. Not malignant. Not harmful in effect.  

The only way to confirm diagnosis of Adenomyosis is by biopsy AFTER a hysterectomy. It’s the only way. I never thought it wouldn’t be there. I had so many of the symptoms. I was confident in my doctor. He was the one to finally give me answers after all these years of question mark pain.

It wasn’t there. Nothing was there.   

I have no path to the pain. I will never have an answer to that question. The welcome back party to the invisible illness club was cold. It’s lonely and empty here. Your companions are more question marks punctuated with anger, guilt, shame and deep aching sadness.

My physical pain is gone. So, look at the bright side, right? What about the dark side…will it come back? And that tiny spark of “what…if…a…miracle…could…happen?” is…extinguished, and I’ve felt that profoundly. All that’s there now is a cavernous hole, with all those question marks still rattling around hollowly.