"Women’s health issues often dismissed"

In November I had an appointment at the Royal Surrey County Hospital to get an ultrasound scan, because I had been experiencing severe lower abdominal pain for a long time.

My mother suffered from endometriosis, so I suspected that this is what may have been happening to me too. The technician, however, told me with such conviction that my pain should have been a lot worse during the scan if I was right. The technician said some women just have bad periods and have to deal with it. They did and their mother before did too.

I felt like the only menstruating person who somehow couldn’t take this pain, and I felt ashamed, even thinking I was wasting her time and that of the NHS. This was after I had gone to A&E a few weeks before at Frimley Hospital, because the pain was so bad I thought I had appendicitis. It turns out I did not have that. And after waiting in A&E for 7 hours I was told, It may be gynaecological and that I should try taking paracetamol. I was also asked if I had eaten that day by an A&E doctor, when I said that I had been feeling faint from the pain. Both times at both hospitals I ended up crying in the parking lot. No diagnosis or treatment followed any of this.

My GP told me that they wouldn’t recommend surgery, because the scan had not showed anything suspicious. That’s even though they admitted endometriosis does not always show on ultrasound scans. Eventually the pain got so bad that I went to see my family in another country to go to a different doctor. They performed a laparoscopy two weeks later, because they did see something suspicious on the scan, and they found severe peritoneal endometriosis in three places. I cried again when I got the diagnosis, but mostly because I didn’t feel like I was insane anymore.

I don’t know if anyone will ever read this, never mind do anything, but I feel very strongly that doctors in this country should be more trained on women’s health.

Conditions like endometriosis are notoriously under-diagnosed and the mental and physical strain of that is too often dismissed. Please also note that I had to pay for my laparoscopy as well as the therapy I needed because of the constant dismissal and pain, 

It would be great for this to at least be passed on to the relevant departments in those hospitals for educational purposes.