I feel it would be a little unfair to ask people to share their stories without first telling mine, so here we go…
Everything hit a turning point during a 2014 trip overseas. I vividly remember being in agony all day on the bus. When we finally arrived at our hotel, I crawled into a tiny porcelain bathtub, turned on the shower, and just sobbed. I remember being hunched over, hugging my shoulders and watching little clots of blood float across my toes and down the drain, thinking, this can’t be me for the rest of my life!
I think it was in that moment that I stopped gaslighting myself about just ‘being a woman with bad periods’ and decided there really was something wrong, but it was still at least four years till I received a diagnosis.
Tackling Endo Head-On
Managing endo has been a ride—think surgeries, a Mirena IUD, and an ever-evolving pain management strategy that doesn’t always play nice with my daily life. Wheat bags have been my best friend and inflictor of heat welts for many years now (IYKYK). For a long time, I shied away from heavily medicating myself with pain meds, because apart from the pain I really didn’t know how the endo was progressing and how radical of steps I needed to take.
I’ve started on a new regime recently, but that’s a story for another day.
Suffice it to say that (like most of the Endo community) I have an obscenely high pain tolerance, but just because I can grin and bear it, doesn’t mean it won’t take its toll. Endo has drastically affected what was, from a young age, an already fragile relationship with my body. For many years I felt that my body was at war with my mind, I directed a lot of anger, frustration, and hate towards it, I felt like it was, quite literally, holding me back from living the life my mind thought I was capable of.
It wasn’t until after my first surgery, I remember looking in the mirror at my bloated, cut open the stitched-up stomach all bandaged and a little oozy and for the first time I looked with some compassion at the thing that was doing its best to keep me alive. Since that day, it has been an imperfect and evolving journey to accept and love all parts of myself, including the parts that mess with my plans for world domination.
Let's Talk Endo
Here’s the deal: endometriosis affects millions, yet it’s often sidelined as just a “woman’s issue.” It’s not. It’s an “everyone issue” that impacts many lives profoundly and pervasively. It took forever to get my diagnosis, and that’s way too common. We need better awareness, better research, better everything!
My goal? It’s a big one, you see, I think that by humanising our triumphs as well as our struggles we can create a richer and more realistic tapestry of what experiencing endo looks like. Existing and continuing with life despite this disease is a colossal accomplishment, I feel proud of myself, and I want others to feel that same pride and sense of accomplishment.
I’m on my own Endo journey, every day, it’s intertwined with my professional journey, my personal relationships and my passions for life. But in each one of those spaces in some small way, I try to use my voice to spark meaningful change and bring the multifaced face of Endo into the spotlight.
Thanks for reading my story. If it resonates with you or you’ve learned something new, that’s a win in my book.
For the longest time,
my life was a cycle of unbearable periods and extreme fatigue that just seemed like the norm. It was just me, dealing with what I thought every woman probably did. I wasn't diagnosed early on; instead, I normalised the pain (like so many do) and pushed through, not realising that these were signs of something more serious.