The image on the screen was tiny, but unmistakable. A small, irregular pocket of tissue, distinct from the abdominal wall, sitting just beneath Clara’s navel like a buried seed. It was surrounded by a haze of inflammation.
“But it bleeds every 28 days,” Clara insisted. navel endometriosis
Clara handed over her phone. The period tracker app was damning: on every single day marked with a red droplet, there was a corresponding note: Bleeding from navel. Pain 7/10. The image on the screen was tiny, but unmistakable
Armed with the PDF, she found a third doctor. Dr. Ionescu was an endometriosis specialist with kind eyes and a no-nonsense manner. Clara lifted her shirt. The bruise had bloomed into a small, firm nodule, the color of a stormy sky. “But it bleeds every 28 days,” Clara insisted
The search results were a ghost town of old forum posts and abandoned questions. But one link, a PDF from the Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology , caught her eye. The title was dense and impenetrable, but one word glowed on the screen:
He paused. “Coincidence. The body is strange.”