I didn’t get my period until I was 15.
Everyone told me to wait,
And that I’ll get it eventually.
I listened to them and kept waiting.
I thought it was just late.
My younger sister even got it before me.
My mother took me to see a doctor to find out what’s wrong.
I expected the doctor to say that it was just a hormonal imbalance.
But it turned out that I had a condition called an “imperforate hymen.”
It’s a congenital defect.
There aren’t any holes in my hymen,
Where the period blood is supposed to come out.
My uterus was enlarged,
And there was a chance it’d burst and kill me.
I didn’t know the reason behind it,
But I had to undergo surgery.
I can’t even begin to tell you,
How discreet everyone was about this surgery,
Because it was “inappropriate” to talk about.
No one was supposed to know about it.
“It’s so no one gets the wrong idea,
Or sees you differently.”
No one in my family knows about the surgery.
It was as if I’d committed a crime,
Instead of just fixing a condition I had.