From Chronic Pain to Clean Fashion: Endometriosis, Fibroid Surgery, and Building a Skin-Safe, Plastic-Free Brand
‘I didn’t realise, until it was gone, that I had forgotten what it felt like to not be in pain. My body and the world were both on fire and this is the story of trying to put out my own.’
I’ve been trying to work out how to write this post for a while. Not because I’m unsure I want to, I’m certain I do but because the story is a personal, tender one and sits very close to my heart and I wanted to find the right words before I opened up. This is the most personal thing I have written and choosing to publish it is because I believe there is power in saying true things out loud, and because I suspect some of you will recognise parts of yourselves in it.
Most of my adult life I have lived with endometriosis and a uterine fibroid. If you know, you know. If you don’t, I’ll try to describe it: it’s a constant, dull, deep aching that never quite goes away. Sometimes accompanied by dramatic cramping like your organs are contorting along with the sensation of a sharp needle stabbing your ovaries, accompanied by a painful heat that radiates from deep within your pelvis into every fibre of your body. Days of painful, persistent presence that embeds itself so deeply into your daily life that you stop registering it as something wrong and begin to mistake it for simply the way things are. Days blurred together in a hazy mist that never lifts, leaving you so tired you want to collapse in the day but so wired you barely sleep through the night. These sleepless nights are filled with the unrelenting throng that aches and tugs deep inside you like a growing cancer.
You adapt around it without fully realising you have been adapting for so long. You cancel plans, you’re unable to show-up how you want to and you rest when you don’t want to, push through when every cell in your body is pleading with you not to, and somewhere across the years you quietly, completely lose track of who you are and what your own baseline feels like. I lost track of mine a long time ago.
Putting out fires
There’s something I need to say before I get to the surgery, because it’s part of this story whether it’s comfortable to include or not.
The years in which my body was at its most inflamed, most unmanageable, most relentlessly painful, were also the years in which I watched - we all watched, the live-streamed destruction of Palestine by a brutal and illegal occupation. The unimaginable scale of loss broadcast in 4K into our homes and our hands and hearts, in real time, without pause, without mercy, day after day after day. A genocide unfolding before the eyes of a world order that had the power to intervene and chose, again and again, to sit idly by.
It is unsurprising that like many others, I was crippled by the everyday horror that I refused to turn away from. My body on fire, the world on fire, and nowhere to put any of it. I would wake each morning to the unrelenting weight of both the pain inside me and the tragedy outside me, finding myself paralysed in a way I had never experienced before. To watch the beauty and the beating heart of a people, of a land, be carved out with such deliberate and sustained brutality - it does something to your soul that I do not have adequate language for. It hollows you, turning something luminous into something ashen. Many of us became husks of ourselves in those months and I was one of them.
‘I will never forgive the systems and the people within them who had the power to make change and chose instead to allow it to continue. That wound does not close, it’s still open and Palestine is still burning.’
I say this here because it’s the honest context for what came next - my body and my conscience were both screaming at me. The delay in seeking surgery - two years of knowing I needed it and not acting happened in this time. Fear was part of it but so was the particular paralysis of a person whose internal resources were already depleted, who was already spending everything I had just to remain upright in a world that felt like it was disintegrating around me and so I became the arbiter of my own pain, silently struggling rather then asking for, or accepting help.
Shame, humility, and asking for help
My body is sacred to me and I treat it as such. The privacy of it, the sovereignty of it, the right to determine what happens to it - these things matter to me at a cellular level. Which is part of what made the process of seeking surgery so difficult, and so layered, and so much more than simply scheduling a procedure.
To submit your body to the hands of another person - even skilled, trusted, chosen, requires a particular kind of surrender that I found profoundly difficult. There is an indignity inherent in it that no amount of clinical professionalism fully removes because you’re vulnerable in a way that’s complete and physical and deeply personal. After a delay of two long years, ignoring my consultants pressing but gentle advice, and me not following his counsel - not because I didn’t trust him, because I did, but because the courage required to place something so sacred into someone else’s care felt, in those years of fire and depletion, simply beyond me. So I ran.
When I finally returned to his office, I walked in carrying both shame and humility in equal measure. Shame - for the years I had waited, for not honouring my own body sooner, for not having listened when I was told to listen and humility - the deep, quiet, uncomplicated humility of a person who had finally run out of the ability to manage alone and was ready, at last, to ask for help. Finally ask, I did, placing my health, my body, my sacred and suffering self, into his skilled hands to which he received that with the gravity and the gentleness it deserved.
Walking into that office with acceptance and finally asking for help was one of the most courageous things I’ve ever done.
The surgery
What I will say about the surgery itself is this: it was brutal, as any invasive surgery such as this always is. There is a particular horror to anaesthesia, a blankness, a theft of time, a waking up in a body that has been operated on while you were absent from it. Beneath that is the deeper horror: that you walked willingly into that darkness, surrendering all control, and your body lay exposed in a humiliating ritual, regardless of the professionals who surrounded you.
There’s such a vulnerability to not knowing, for a moment, where the edges of yourself end or where you are upon coming to. Even through this fog however, I remember coming back to consciousness and knowing without having any recollection of being told that this benign tumour that had ravaged my body along with the widespread endometriosis was detached from its life-force - me, it’s unwilling host. Knowing, in the way the body knows things before the mind catches up - instinctively, viscerally. The dull, constant, unrelenting ache that had been the background frequency of my entire adult life was suddenly gone. Someone had reached inside me and turned down my nervous system…for the first time there was a quiet I had no name for.
‘Overcome with calm. A sense of safety I hadn’t felt for a very long time. The kind of quiet that makes you realise, with a jolt and a grief, just how much you had lost part of yourself.’
I lay there and wept, not from pain, though there was the post-op kind of pain which was different - but from something rawer, the disbelief of absence. From the realisation, arriving slowly like a tide, that I could no longer remember what it had felt like to not be in pain. That I had lived inside that ache for so long it had become invisible to me, and it was only in its removal that I could finally see the shape of what it had taken.
I guess you can lose something and not know it’s lost until the moment it is returned to you.
The recovery
The days that followed were gruelling in the way that real recovery always is - long, painful, immobilising, and unglamorous. My husband took care of me with a steadiness and patience I think only becomes fully visible in moments of genuine need - babying me back to health, taking care of everything, asking nothing of me except that I rest. That is how a real man loves…by showing up, by carrying the weight, by being the hero no one claps for and he did all of it for me. My love and gratitude for him run deeper than I'll ever be able to express here.
Each day of recovery I felt more like myself, not my former self but a new version of me I had yet to meet, because she had never previously had the conditions to exist. The absence of chronic pain does’t only remove a physical sensation, it returns you to yourself. The mental load lifts. The low, constant vigilance dies down and the background hum of a nervous system perpetually braced for the next wave finally, mercifully begins to rest.
What it has to do with the brand
The Petite Cartel is a very new brand and I’m a very new version of myself and those two things are intertwined.
When you have spent most of your adult life managing chronic pain and inflammation, your relationship with your own energy becomes profoundly complicated. You learn to ration it with a precision that healthy people rarely need. You know that giving everything today may mean being incapable tomorrow and as a result you develop out of necessity, what I can only describe as an all-or-nothing pattern. Intense periods of effort followed by the crash your body and mind demand and that chronic illness makes non-negotiable.
This has shaped how I am building the brand in ways I am still grappling with. The slowness is not just an aesthetic or a marketing position. I’m one person, without a wider creative team, without the infrastructure of a larger business, constructing something from the very beginning at the pace that is genuinely sustainable for me. There are days I can do a great deal, days I cannot do very much at all and I’m learning to work with that reality rather than in shame of it.
This condition has instilled in me an instinctive need to start something that doesn’t harm. Something built with intention, from the beginning, properly - not assembled quickly and corrected later. Something that honours the materials it is made from, the bodies it is made for, and the world it enters.
That is The Petite Cartel. Natural fibres because I will not make things that poison me, plastic-free fastenings because the details carry the values, made to order because I refuse to produce things that have nowhere to go. Petite fit because I have spent most of my life wearing clothes designed for someone else’s body, and I know intimately what that costs a person’s sense of themselves.
To the surgeon and his team
There are a good many people in this world who spend their working lives having held the precious trust of others, reaching into other people’s bodies and changing them for the better. Who carry the full, extraordinary weight of someone else’s health in their hands, literally, and who do it with a precision and a steadiness and a humanity that I find, even now, almost incomprehensible. My surgical team gave me back something I had not known I had lost. They altered the fabric of my daily life in ways I am still discovering, quietly, in small moments, and will be discovering for a long time yet.
To the good men and women who do this work, who perform acts of surgical wizardry on ordinary people and send them home changed, lighter, more themselves - thank you for the skill and humanity. For the gravity with which you hold the sacred, fragile, irreplaceable fact of another person’s body. For the care that good medicine, in the most skilled and human hands, is capable of carrying.
Both fires, and what comes next
This post comes at a time when I feel the world and my body have both been burning. I believe I have put out my own internal fire, though it still smoulders, as these things do, with the ever-present possibility of reigniting and I will undoubtedly carry that vigilance with me always. However, for now the acute blaze is out and in the quiet that follows, I find myself with something I have not had for a very long time: capacity and the ability to look outward as well as inward.
Palestine is still burning, which is not a metaphor but a fact and I will not write a post about fire and recovery and starting something clean without naming it, because to omit it would be a dishonesty I am not capable of. The world is still on fire in ways that those of us with any conscience cannot look away from, and must not.
What I can do, what any of us can do, in our own small and unglamorous ways; is try to put out the fires within our reach. To make choices that are ethical and considered and informed. To refuse, in the small daily decisions of what we buy and from whom and how, to contribute to systems that harm. To build things that are clean from the beginning and demand more of the world we participate in, one deliberate choice at a time.
That is what The Petite Cartel is trying to do and I hope, in whatever way feels true to you, that we can work towards this together.i number 3 numb
Mintu,
Founder | The Petite Cartel
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