“It was a cold winter evening in Frankfurt am Main. It was snowing. I was walking through Bethmann Strasse, on my way to the library. Suddenly, a sharp stabbing pain pierced my womb. I fell on the ground to my knees. I started my period, as every month. But this month there was something new: pain.
I took the U-bahn back home as I could. I was living at the time in a caravan camp in the city suburbs. In Germany there was a point in which property occupancy became impossible in the eighties, so the German radical left began to occupy land where to live in trucks, caravans and wooden wagons. In an eviction it is much easier to move carrying your home on your back. Today there are lots of so called Wagenplatz. I lived in Borsigllee, one of the biggest in Europe without running water, electricity or bathroom. I was 23 years old.
But what I wanted to talk about here is what I felt in my womb that evening. About how I dragged myself to Wagenplatz crying and looked for my boyfriend at the time, a huge scary punk, to tell him I was in trouble. How I crawled alone towards my wagon, because my punk boyfriend, Robert, did not come; he pretty much had it with his own psychosis. About how I cried in my bed freeze to death and desperate asking myself what was happening inside me.
It took me years to understand. Many. During those learning years I fell broken in pain countless times in many places. The scene use to be accompanied by cold sweats and tremors. I screamed and cried for hours and sometimes days. Ibuprofen brought temporal relief to my misfortune, and I say temporal because I soon got used to the drug and it stopped being effective. I occasionally went to consult a gynecologist looking for solutions, but they told me in their patriarchal worldview everything was normal and prescribed me useless painkillers.
Once, back in Spain, and this time in the waiting room of my podiatrist, I had my period and I started feeling womb cramps, as every month. The nurse called the podiatrist who watched this sad scene and understood what gynecologists could not understand, this was a serious matter, pain torn me apart and it was necessary to do something. So he prescribed me a drug whose name I cannot remember but whose overall effect was like a horse shot.…