"It feels like there's barbed wire, like scraping it."
This is what life with endometriosis feels like for those whose symptoms are often dismissed ... and for those who often wait years for a diagnosis.
This is what life with endometriosis feels like for those whose symptoms are often dismissed ... and for those who often wait years for a diagnosis.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Period pain, that causes you to pass out, throw up, unable to eat, doesn't go away with any painkillers, isn't normal.
00:20Unfortunately, every doctor that I've seen since I was 14 years old dismissed all the symptoms as me just having my period and that's just what my body wants to do.
00:29This is a healthy uterus. And this is a uterus with a disease called endometriosis.
00:34This disease causes tissue to grow outside the uterus. Endometriosis causes pain, organ dysfunction, and in some cases, like mine, infertility.
00:44Yep, my uterus looks like this and that's why I couldn't get pregnant naturally.
00:48I feel like one of the things that isn't talked about a lot with endo is feeling like you can do something and then getting halfway through it, like going for a walk, and then realizing that you don't have enough energy to get home.
01:18I get a lot of questions about what my pain feels like, and a lot of the times it's really hard to articulate, but right now specifically, I have my pain right here on my left side of my lower abdomen, shooting down my leg.
01:39And it feels like it's on fire, but also in like a fist, but it also feels like there's barbed wire like scraping it, and it also feels like things are like pulling.
01:48I need to go start driving again, but I'm scared that it's gonna happen when I'm driving.
01:52I have a disease called endometriosis, and I had a mass that was the size of a grapefruit on my ovary, and all of my organs, internal organs, and reproductive organs are cemented together.
02:04And I also know that my egg reserve is bad because I did look into freezing my eggs.
02:08I'm dealing with a tough pain day with my endometriosis, so I thought I'd share what I do on a day where I'm hurting.
02:14Heat really helps when I'm having horrible cramps, so I use my heating pad and lie down.
02:18I got my menstrual cycle for 10 days every two weeks.
02:22It was very, very heavy, very, very painful.
02:25About two days or three days after my period when I was ovulating, I would be in such excruciating pain I could not walk.
02:32Things did not start being taken serious by doctors until my stomach looked like, hold on.
02:37This is what my stomach looked like.
02:47He then says that my pain while running is psychosomatic.
02:51One of my favorite female medics was in the back corner looking like she was about to have an aneurysm.
02:57But I did witness a grown man explain to a grown woman how the uterus works and then tell her her pain is not real.
03:09Upside to that story, I now am getting hysterectomy to be rid of my pain.
03:19Okay, Batman, we'll take it from here.
03:21If you're one of the 200 million people whose uterus is affected by endometriosis, stay hopeful.
03:27Even Marilyn Monroe suffered from endometriosis.
03:30And she's iconic, just like you.