As a patient, it’s frustrating to know a solution may be just around the corner but that you probably won’t be there in time to benefit
I’m kneeling on the hard, cold tiles of my bathroom floor retching into the toilet bowl, and I’ve been here for some time. The colour has drained from my skin and I’m clammy and delirious from a pain so intense, it is simply indescribable. Something is squeezing me from the inside so ferociously that I can barely catch my breath. All I can do is retch, unproductively, and writhe. “This must be what labour feels like,” I think, in a surreal, out-of-body way.
Ten years on, and one difficult childbirth later, I can confirm with some authority that this unrelenting, all-consuming pain was so much worse than giving birth. The bathroom floor episode was my first major inkling that something wasn’t right in my body. It was so frightening that I couldn’t dismiss it (even if A&E staff told me there was nothing wrong when I dragged myself there, and a GP explained it away as probably just a stomach bug). In reality, I had always been in pain to some degree. I had always bled through my PE shorts at school, swelled two dress sizes during my period – didn’t everyone? But even when my symptoms were at their worst, no one mentioned endometriosis.
