“By the point I was diagnosed with endometriosis after 17 years, it was in my lungs.” “I was ignored for nearly 20 years, and now I rely on crutches.” “My pain was dismissed for 27 years, until I needed a full hysterectomy and a stoma.”
If you follow women’s health, these kinds of stories will be, sadly, all too familiar. The process of getting help for heavy period or endometriosis symptoms is – often literally – painfully slow. Being diagnosed can take over a decade. There is no known cure. Doctors still aren’t even sure why endometriosis occurs, and scientific research suffers due to historic underfunding. This March is Endometriosis Awareness Month, but the condition is still widely characterised and dismissed as ‘just a bad period’.
