In the fall of 2021, I suddenly felt an overwhelming pain in my lower abdomen. The pain was unlike anything I had ever experienced; it felt like tiny knives rhythmically spinning around inside my body. I couldn’t stop retching from the pain, and when I called the emergency medical service in a panic, I was told to wait 1,5 hours due to understaffing.

Up until that moment, I would have described my relationship with my own body as one of friendly indifference, but that was about to change forever.

I was finally driven to the emergency room. The doctor took a quick look at me and dismissed it as menstrual cramps. When I realized they didn’t believe me when I said something was wrong, I couldn’t bring myself to protest. They let me stay anyway and put me in an empty room, where I lay for a few hours. They gave me painkillers, which had no effect. Finally, my friend stormed into the emergency room and demanded that they treat me. They ended up giving in and sent me on to the hospital.

There, the gynecologist performed an ultrasound and discovered the remnants of a large, ruptured cyst on my ovaries. The cyst had been the size of a large grapefruit or a small baby’s head. It had ruptured and filled my abdomen with old blood. No wonder the acetaminophen didn’t work.

They diagnosed me with “endometriosis” during the subsequent surgery.

Endometriosis is a condition that affects the female reproductive system and is often characterized by painful periods, heavy bleeding, and infertility. It’s estimated to affect 10% of all women. I’d never heard of the condition, and quickly realized that no one else really knew what it was either. It’s notorious for being, to quote the yellow brochure I received at the hospital, “a mysterious women’s disease we don’t know much about.” The brochure was from 1991.

I was in the hospital for a week. They had placed me in the maternity ward, and the only other patients that week were a new family. I could catch a glimpse of them through the half-closed door on my way to the operating room, and sometimes I could hear the parents laughing and the newborn baby crying.

I was haunted by intense, recurring dreams during my stay. One of the recurring dreams was that I gave birth to an alien child. I think it was an alien child because that’s what the vague ultrasound images of the cyst looked like before I had surgery. In the dreams, I became a UFO MOM, and the surgery turned into a kind of ritual.

These dreams became an important part of how I processed the experience. Slowly, I returned to my normal life, but the idea of the ALIEN BABY and the UFO MOM continued to swirl in the back of my mind - especially as I got to know more women who had experienced similar situations.

The strongest memory we shared was the feeling of not being believed by doctors and of being dismissed. We feel exhausted; not just from the pain, but from knowing that we have to live with this for a long time, all the way through menopause. The only treatment suggested is hormone therapy, which comes with many other possible side effects.

A gynecologist told me there wasn’t much they could do to help me until I wanted to get pregnant. Only then did they have a support system for me. That’s when I decided to make this film.