It's 2011, I'm 17 and studying hard for my upcoming A Level exams. It was an unassuming Sunday morning. It was 5.30am and I was just waking up, horrendously early but essential for my 6.30am breakfast shift at the local hotel. I jumped in the shower feeling perfectly normal, and then trudged back into my bedroom resenting another early start. And then it hit me… An indescribable pain… A pain like no other I had ever experienced before. I barely managed a meek but loud “mum!” before I collapsed to the floor. Mum helped me back into bed and we assumed (hoped) it would pass. I’d started my period a few years earlier, the pain would usually rear its ugly head a day or so before I was due, it was painful but never this bad. It felt like someone was trying to rake out my insides with a thousand knives, whilst setting them on fire and punching me, hard, for extra measure. After a few hours of being crumpled into the foetal position, it was clear the pain wasn’t going away on its o
Welcome to my first blog post! I am a bit scared about writing this first one but recently lots of people have started to speak out and I wanted to add my voice and perspective to these, to really try and emphasise how severe this illness is. I've struggled massively mentally and physically for years. It's so often dismissed by friends, the workplace and even doctors as "just period pains" but it's far from that. So what the bloody hell is it? Let’s start with the basics, endometriosis is a bit of a mouthful. Even I struggled to say it when first diagnosed. It’s pronounced end-oh-mee-tree-oh-sis . The oh-sis at the end is very fitting for this condition, because oh-sis let me tell you it’s horrible. Endometriosis occurs when tissue similar to the womb lining starts to grow outside of the womb in other areas, such as the ovaries. This causes pain, inflammation, scar tissue and sometimes cysts. The main symptoms can include chronic pain (often debilitating), infe