When I was 14 I had the first of what I came to call “Death Cramps”. I literally crawled the last 50 feet of empty hallway from my science classroom to the nurse’s office. I had never felt pain like this before in my life, and I thought for sure I was dying, or that my appendix had burst, or that an alien was emerging from my abdomen. The nurse rolled her eyes after hearing I was on my period, and gave me a hot water bottle. I threw up every 10 minutes for an hour, and kept passing out from the pain, so she finally called my parents and sent me home.  My doctor later told me “Some women have bad cramps, it’ll go away when you have your first baby”.