Pelvic Pain Awareness Month Awareness - Abby’s Story
I vividly remember the first time I got my period. I was 14, it was a Thursday in the middle of English class. I was overjoyed at first! I was later than all my friends and ecstatic to finally join the ranks of 'real women'. It took less than 24 hours for my joy to unravel, the next morning I woke up with the worst pain I'd ever experienced in my life. I was so confused, my friends never said told me it was this bad. My mum picked me up off the tiled floor as I began to retch; "this happened to me too, this is normal". Like any 14 year old girl would, I believed her. It wasn't until almost a decade later I would come to realise, she probably had endo too.
What followed was a never-ending carousel of specialists, hormones and opiates. Each new drug taking away the pain for a few months at most. Each new doctor repeating the same droning phrases ad nauseum- this is normal, it's your anxiety, are you sure you're not just constipated, you can't be upset because i haven't told you what you wanted to hear, and my personal favourite- you don't have cancer, so you shouldn't be complaining. It wasn't until I was 23 by years old, after another desperate late night google search of my symptoms that I came across the word endometriosis. And I only got swift treatment becuase i was lucky enough at the time to live in Canberra which had one of very few, perhaps the only one at the time, publicly funded endometriosis clinic. The surgeon found stage 2 endometriosis on my bladder and pelvic walls. I sobbed when I woke up from the surgery, because I knew in my heart the pain was gone.
These days I thankfully don't experience much pelvic pain anymore. But the marks left by my endo lesions will always remain. I suffer severe IBS, I will never have the bladder capacity of a normal person, the expectation of the return of the lesions is forever praying in the back of my mind, and I quietly wonder whether I will be able to give my partner any children. I am so grateful of the advances that have been made in endo awareness and care, even in the few short years since I've been diagnosed. Maybe a 14 year old girl won't have to suffer and wonder and be pushed aside for 9 years, like I was.
At the follow up to my surgery , the doctor offered aftercare to reduce the appearance of my scars, but I declined, instead I got the words "Fight like a girl" tattooed over the raised flesh. I didn't want to forget my scars, I wanted to remember how hard I'd fought for them.
