In April 2006, my sister Roxanne announced she was pregnant! I remember feeling shocked, happy, disappointed, and excited all at once. When we were kids, we vowed to go through the pregnancy journey together, when we were grown up and married. I was married in 2004, but I definitely didn’t feel like an adult even though I’d just turned 32 when my sister told me she was pregnant. I remember thinking she told me because she wanted me to take her to the clinic… so I offered to attend the abortion with her since she wasn’t yet married. Fortunately, she saw my good intentions and assured me she was ready for motherhood and that she and her partner had plans to marry after the baby was born. Her due date was November 2006. She was so beautiful, pregnancy definitely agreed with her; labour not so much as I recall she had ‘back labour’ and was in a lot of pain. I remember feeling guilty that I wasn’t pregnant at the same time so we could experience growing a human being together. I also reme

I had moved all my belongings into a storage unit my sister had arranged for me through one of her customers. I was very lucky to have the space for free. In exchange for a rebate in rent, I donated my nearly new appliances to our landlord. My sister and I slept together in the same room and bed until her ex-boyfriend moved out. He was such a douche. He seemed to refuse to acknowledge they had broken up. I had fun because I had someone to pick on and take my aggression out on… I was very sarcastic and quite the bitch in my 20s. I didn’t realize it, but my bitchy sarcasm was my wall of steel, my fortress – better to chase people away now than get screwed over; those who saw thru the façade had a chance, but not really, nobody got ‘in’ to know me. No one. I liked it like that. My long-standing opinion is that people are not to be trusted; they all just want something from you. Those who were too dumb to run or thought they saw through the façade would eventually face my brutal honesty an

My health problems began in my 40s. In late 2014, I was diagnosed with severe and chronic migraines which translated to 23 migraines per month. They were relentless. I tried so many medications for migraine prevention, gained 25 pounds in three weeks while taking an SSRI and became very depressed. I decided to find an alternate solution.  After my allergies diagnosis in 2014, I was referred to Dr. Matthews, a Gastroenterologist. I saw him in April 2015 and he performed my first ever colonoscopy that August. He removed the polyps he found in early September 2015 and told me to come back for a follow up in three years. At age 41, I had a partial hysterectomy in late September 2015. I had been progressively experiencing severe pain every month until one day, the pain was so bad, my nerves seemed to seize in my legs and I was no longer able to walk. I was diagnosed with severe Adenomyosis and when my uterus was removed, the surgeon told me it was 4 sizes larger than it should have been,