ALEXA’S STORY: ‘ENDOMETRIOSIS DESTROYED MY CHANCE FAR MARRIAGE’
“To me, what’s terrible is having the man you’re about to marry give up on you and walk out when you’re sick and need him most. What’s worse is not being able to get a straight answer from five doctors about why I was so sick. The combination of the two managed to leave me alone and in horrible pain for about a year. Finally, I found out that endometriosis was the cause of it all.
‘I never heard of this disease until a few months ago. It was confirmed by the sixth doctor I went to and I wish I’d seen him before Jack, my fianc?, took off Jack was pretty fed up with me and my condition and all our trips to emergency rooms, occasionally in the middle of the night. I would double over with pain and sometime could barely breathe.
“Jade said he loved me and that he’d do anything to help, but he didn’t exactly love what he’d been hearing from the doctors: that my pain was from V.D.! It’s humiliating to be told by three different doctors on three different occasions over eight months that your symptoms—most of all your pain—add up to an advanced stage of venereal disease. Especially when you’re clean! Two other doctors treated me for a bladder disorder, vaginal infections, and once for a spastic colon. I had the reeling that they were wrong and that it was something deeper, more serious, but I didn’t know why I felt that. It scared me.
‘I was living on sulfa drugs, antibiotics, and assorted painkillers. The severest pain lasted about three or four days. Then I’d feel achy, and then okay for a while. I heard from a friend that orgasm relieved pelvic tension, so I’d try to be more sexually active. The irony was char intercourse hurt, leaving both Jack and me frustrated and angry. Jack was beginning to accuse me of faking the pain and cheating on him. It was die last test, the one for chlamydia, chat did it tor Jack. His sympathy had been strained to the limit and he left me. The pain increased in frequency and duration.
“About six months ago, I was telling a friend and her sister about the problem and I got an answer. My friend’s sister was a sufferer, too. She’d been through ten yean of misery and suffered the loss of an ovary, and she still had some problems. She said she felt as if she were reliving her own history by listening to me. When I heard about endometriosis tor the first time, the pain made sense. I finally felt I had a chance.”
It’s always sad to hear such stories of women who don’t get any emotional support or effective medical care for long periods of time. Not once was Alexa’s pain taken seriously. This is the real crisis in diagnosing endometriosis. What is the problem?
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