It’s a weird moment when you realise doctors don’t know everything. Mine occurred after I was hospitalised for a raging pelvic infection, which doctors had dismissed for weeks as nothing more than a standard UTI. Bloods were taken, scans were done and I was rushed into surgery that was forecast to take 45 minutes but, in fact, took four hours. At 26 years old, I lost a fallopian tube that was too damaged to stay in my body. It took months to recover physically – and far longer to adjust mentally.
But I’d learned something: that, as a woman, you have to advocate for yourself more than you should to get the help you need within the healthcare system. After demanding follow-up scans and blood tests, I was diagnosed with PCOS and showed signs of suspected endometriosis and pelvic scarring, which left me in agonising pain. I’m still yet to have the endometriosis diagnosis confirmed; on average, this laborious process takes just shy of a decade.
