![]() Endometriosis causes grief, you grieve what your life could be if you weren’t chronically ill when you wake up from your fourteenth procedure, that lasted for hours, only to hear your condition has worsened since the last surgery only three months prior. I can now say that through the guidance of my loved ones, specialists and allied health professionals that I am no longer in that headspace.Įndometriosis is a disease that is very good at making you feel alone. Endometriosis and chronic pain brings you to your knees and I would be lying if I tried to say it hasn’t affected my mental health to the point where I thought I was better off dead than trying to exist with a silent, incurable and chronic illness. A severe endometriosis flare can feel like having your appendix has burst a thousand times over and having to deal with knowing that despite the surgeries and removal of the disease, it will grow back.ĭuring my journey with endometriosis I have not always been honest on the effect it has had on my mental health. This full body pain, depending on the severity can either be a strong discomfort where it is normal enough for me that I can get on with my day or it can be severe enough that I am sobbing on the floor and feeling like I am completely alone in the world. No matter if I am standing, sitting, walking, laying, running or curled up, the feeling is there. For what has become my “normal” would render others to the emergency department or concerned that their appendix has ruptured. In the last nine years I truthfully could not identify a minute in a day where I wasn’t in some type of pain. This causes me to not only suffer from pelvic pain but chronic pain throughout my entire body. Doctors have discovered endometriosis around my uterus, pelvic walls, bladder, bowel, kidney, ovaries, fallopian tubes, urethra, pouch of Douglas, spinal cord and most recently, my diaphragm. I spend my days living with chronic, intense pain that I have spent the past nine years learning how to mask from others. My mother was a highly skilled IVF nurse and as an endometriosis warrior herself, I was lucky that she recognised the symptoms almost immediately and was able to connect me to the right specialists. It takes the average women seven years to be diagnosed and treated for endometriosis whereas my diagnosis came within 8 months of my first period. A lot of people hear this and are saddened but in retrospect I am one of the lucky ones. Since April 2011, I have undergone fourteen laparoscopic procedures for the deep excision and removal of stage IV severe endometriosis. I underwent my first laparoscopic procedure in April 2011 where I had the confirmed diagnosis of stage III endometriosis and shocked everyone, including my gynecologist at the time, with how severe my endometriosis was for such a young woman. I was only just becoming a woman and whilst I was on the path to figuring out who I was and navigating puberty, I never once comprehended that I would spend the rest of my life living with an incurable disease. I first developed signs of endometriosis at the age of fourteen. The symptoms of endometriosis are chronic pain particularly, but not always, during the menstrual cycle and ovulation, painful sexual intercourse, pain with bowel and bladder use, nausea, lethargy, weight gain and infertility. What I don’t tell them when they ask about my endometriosis, is how this incurable disease renders me powerless to my own body. For most women, when they go through their period the tissue that lines their uterus goes into their body and is discarded, causing no further issues, however for women with endometriosis, that tissue sheds itself and has nowhere else to go but the surrounding organs. ![]() A lot of people ask me what exactly is endometriosis when I tell them of my 9 year battle with this invisible illness and I am often quick to respond with the definition that it is a condition that occurs when the tissue that makes up the lining of a woman’s uterus is present on other organs inside of her body. My name is Georgia and I am a twenty-four-year-old woman from Melbourne, Australia.
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