The first one was last night. Just before I fell asleep I was beating myself up over the thing I see as my one really major misstep.
Last summer when my husband told me that he was choosing "his best friend" over his brother to help him drive all of our belongings out in the moving truck I was not clear enough about how I felt. I expressed hesitations to both of them but all of those hesitations together didn't even add up to one solid beating for the bush.
What I should have said immediately and without hesitation was. "If you're driving out with her then don't bother driving out at all."
But I didn't, moment lost. I guess it's good to have at least one solid thing to regret. (over, and over, and over)
Anyway the dream I had right after beating myself up over not following my intuition, was about an issue over which I've had many doctors visits in my life.
I have endomitriosis. But doctors could never figure out why, when I described the pain I was having, I would tell them it was on both sides of my body. I was told over and over again that the pain I was describing was not possible and above and beyond that could not be endometriosis, could not be anything really. As endometriosis is clearly reproductive cycle related and every one knows every woman only produces one egg per month, on one side of her body it was not possible for me to be consistently experiencing this pain on both sides.
I was written off, doctor after doctor, as having imaginary pain. Even when this pain was so extreme it would wake me in the middle of the night and had once left me balled up fetal style in a supermarket aisle. It took a supposed appendicitis which turned out to be an actual ruptured cyst, before a doctor discovered that I release two eggs per month.
Two eggs = two sets of shed cells = the amazing amounts of scar tissue wrapped around organs that "could not possibly be causing me any pain" and most importantly = the reason "the pinchys" were on both sides of my body month after agonizing month.
The dream last night was about a doctor actually putting all of this together and telling me I wasn't crazy for experiencing this pain on both sides of my body.
When I woke up from this dream what I found most interesting was the realization that I'm not alone. Even doctors often think there is one set formula you can expect in diagnosing even the most common illness. All of us focus on the abnormalities to this formula. The ways it cannot possibly be what we can otherwise so clearly see that it is.
I too searched for those abnormalities, ignored that all the walls were in a different place in my house and instead said "look, there are still walls!" ignored that the signs could only be leading to one thing, stuck my head firmly in the sand and went on frantically trying to build the most perfect sand castle ever.
But the pinchy's were there, on both sides and then some, there was no denying that these symptoms could not possibly point to any other illness and sometimes we all (doctors included) just have to go out on a limb, scream out a diagnosis (if that's what it takes) and begin to deal with the problem.
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