A teacher who suffered chronic pain every day worried she had ovarian cancer before being diagnosed with an incurable condition.
Former English teacher Michelle da Silva Willis, 43 and from Toxteth, worried she'd be seen as a "hypocrite" lecturing students on attendance while taking time off work due to a "really painful lower back" and an unsettled stomach. She put off visiting the GP until two years later when the doctor suggested irritable bowel syndrome or a kidney infection, but she suspected it was something more serious.
The symptoms robbed Michelle of intimacy with her partner Craig, and they got worse after he died in 2019. Later that year when a scan revealed a mass that turned out to be ovarian cysts. But it took until last summer to finally be diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition where tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body, sometimes causing fertility problems along with bleeding and chronic pain, particularly during periods.
