Carolyn Wadey-Barron is a regular contributor to Ensemble who lives in a hidden valley on the Coromandel Peninsula.
March is Endometriosis Awareness Month, although most sufferers are acutely aware of endo every month, often suffering pain, discomfort and fatigue every day.
For the last 30 years, endo has been a cruel shadow that follows me wherever I go, perpetually waiting for its next chance to wound me. I am Persephone, dragged back down to the underworld just as I feel the sun on my face. The myth of Persephone has always felt like an apt analogy for endo – the scarlet seeds of the pomegranate, the cyclical descent into the underworld and the way with which the chthonic deity merges fertility with death. Each month I am pulled apart and shattered, and only just have time to glue myself back together before the blow comes again.
When I first got my period at age 11, I could not fathom how my life could continue. I would lie in bed weeping, while imagining my ovaries were two rocks grinding together. I would spend days and days in pain, feeling so confused and alone as none of my friends or my sisters were ever cut down the way I was. When my worried mother took me to see our ornery family GP to ask for advice as I was missing a week of school each month due to pain, his face screwed up into a look that was as exasperated as it was irritated: “Painful periods are just something that women must go through,” he said, before writing a prescription for the pill.
By that time I was 12.
Encountering medical misogyny before you’ve even hit your teens means that for the rest of your life whenever you see a doctor, your default thinking is, they won’t believe me. It took moving cities and changing to a new (woman) GP for my symptoms to be believed. Even though my mum was witness to my monthly pain, often so bad I would vomit or pass out or both, her word was not good enough for the family GP either.
My first laparoscopy at age 17 revealed I had Stage 4 endometriosis with ‘chocolate’ cysts on both ovaries and scarring and adhesions all over my uterus, bowel and bladder. (The term ‘chocolate cysts’ is disgusting and should also be eradicated – don’t come for my only comfort!)
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