"Every part of my body hurt"
After years of pain, the double-Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel was diagnosed with endometriosis. But her diagnosis came too late to save her fertility
“The weekend I first began to bleed, my family had just moved house. The furniture was shrouded, the mood was furious and purposive; we were redecorating, soaking and scraping off wallpaper, layer after layer of it: regency stripes, faded sepia vistas and blown roses.
“My mother kept me up to the task, lugging buckets of water and pushing around a yard brush. Exercise was good for menstrual pain, she thought. As the paper dropped in curls to the floorboards, I would have liked to drop and curl up too; as I bled, sweated and shook, something was scraping and chiselling, urgently, inside my body. I felt – and I was right – that I was leaving normal life behind. The rest of the family were in a lively DIY commercial, while I had slid away from them into an after-midnight horror film.
“To be …