Navel Endometriosis Updated | Desktop |

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.

The surgery took forty minutes.

The first time Clara saw the tiny bruise just below her navel, she barely registered it. She was twenty-three, a graduate student in marine biology, and her body was a map of small, inexplicable marks—scrapes from coral samples, the faint grid of a yoga mat pressed into her back, the occasional pimple. navel endometriosis

Over the next year, Clara became a detective of her own strange navel. The bleeding was cyclical, she realized with a growing, queasy horror. It arrived like clockwork, a day before her period. And it hurt—a deep, cramping, familiar pain. The kind of pain that belonged in her uterus, not two inches above it. The image on the screen was tiny, but unmistakable