There's a lot of disease and sickness in this world, and most of us are going to deal with some form of illness from time to time. I've had my fair share of feeling like crap. However, there was one thing that was the most painful thing that I've experienced and had the longest affect on me. Endometriosis.
What is endometriosis? In medical vocabulary, it's a condition resulting from endometrial tissue growing outside of the uterus. Basically what that means is the lining of the uterus decides it needs more space than the uterus is giving it, so it starts to grow outside of it, causing immense amounts of pain.
I'm not writing this to complain about my condition, I'm writing this to inform people. I had absolutely no idea what endometriosis was until it happened to me. I suffered pain from it for a good two years before they finally figured out what was going on. At first, it felt just like really bad period cramps. Now, I have a pretty high pain tolerance and I don't cry (from pain) easily. But as time went by, endometriosis had me doubled over, laying on my bed sobbing because I was in so much pain. It literally felt like my uterus was trying to self-destruct. NOTHING helped. Not Tylenol, not even pain pills (which would help for a good ten minutes).
Luckily, my doctor is amazing and had an inkling of what was going on, so after many, many appointments with her, she sent me to a gynecologist. With endometriosis, there really isn't a sure way to diagnose it without going in surgically and looking with a tiny camera. So that's what we did. He scheduled a time and went in. They made three little cuts, one in my belly button and two above my uterus on the right and left side of my belly. What they found was a whole bunch of endometrial tissue covering the outside of my uterus. Luckily, we got to it before it reached my ovaries. They took a laser to it and got it all off, but basically now I'm not allowed to have periods because if I do, it will most likely start all over again. That was in 2013.
Flash forward to now, the summer of 2016. My mother has had four major strokes and multiple small ones in between. I've finished my first year of college and am so glad to be home for the summer. Except, I'm starting to bleed through the pill that I've been taking continuously for the past three years. I call my doctor and she tells me to go ahead and let myself have a period, we'll see what happens, that sort of thing. So I do it. And that pain starts again. I go to see another gynecologist, who basically tells me that the only thing we can do it up the dosage of my pill. However, this is also dangerous due to my mom's strokes. Excess estrogen is known to lead to blood clotting and strokes, and I'm already taking a lot. So we up the pill despite the things it could lead to.
This is just a peek into my long, intricate battle with endometriosis. There is only one known cure for endometriosis: to take out the uterus and ovaries. Because of my age, no one will do this. The reason this crawls up my skin so much is the assumption that I want to have children. I've always known, since I was a child, that I wanted to adopt. It is also one of the (many) reasons I am such a big proponent for access to birth control. So many women -- roughly one in 10 girls and women in the U.S. -- suffer from endometriosis. Since the only real treatment is continuous birth control, without access to it women suffer for no reason. We are forced to suffer because we are women. We are one half of the population, and without us, humanity would be screwed. Something needs to change.
