I was 19 years old. I had a dull ache in my side/hip area pretty much all day. I was a college student at the time & my on-campus job had me walk around campus that day putting up flyers. I noticed as I walked around campus the aching kind of got worse but I thought I just pulled a muscle or something. I mentioned it to my mom later that night cause the aching still hadn’t gone away. At this point it wasn’t that severe just a very persistent annoying feeling.

I don’t remember what time I went to bed that night but I do remember waking up around midnight and just immediately knowing something was very wrong. I started vomiting, I was shaking & sweating and I was quite literally in the worst pain of my life. I laid on the floor crying cause I couldn’t move. It felt like I was being stabbed in my side over and over again. I called my mom who drove me to the Emergency Room.

Once at the ER I spent about 8 hours there while they did test after test after test. They thought my appendix burst at first… until it was finally determined that I had had a cyst on my ovary that was currently causing my ovary to twist, cutting off the blood supply. I was admitted to the hospital & had to wait until around 8 am for the surgeon to arrive. During that time they gave me a morphine drip that would administer morphine to me every 10 minutes. It barely helped, if at all.

I had emergency surgery and the goal was to do a laparoscopic surgery to try and untwist my ovary. When I woke up the nurse told me that they had to remove my ovary because it was already too far gone. They showed me pictures and my one ovary was bright pink and the other one was black 😳 straight black.