According to tampon adverts, being on my period should be the highlight of my month. I should be biking around bumpy cobbled streets, preferably wearing white hot pants, laughing hysterically at the air with boundless energy. I should be cartwheeling whilst doing tricks with basketballs or raucously sprinting across a beach for no apparent reason. Instead, I find myself curled up in a ball somewhere inappropriate, like the bathroom floor, the tearoom at work, or the floor of a tube on the London Underground (more on that later). My periods were always rather extreme, and I often had a sixth sense that one day, I would hear words of a diagnosis that I could already feel screaming out at me from the depths of my womb.

Growing up, I often felt a little different, like something wasn’t quite right.

My periods arrived at the early age of eleven. They were very heavy and painful from the beginning, lasting a week or two at the time. I would lose so much blood that I would frequently leak through any sanitary protection and ruin my clothes.

Not before long, blood began to pour out of me so heavily that I was waking up in the mornings completely soiled with blood that had spread as far as the back of my hair. My mattress looked like a murder scene and my little pj’s were stuck to me, cold and sticky. 

Looking back, my reflection appeared reminiscent of a scene from the film Carrie, yet visits to the doctor revealed that I was simply unfortunate to experience heavy periods and that I would eventually ‘grow out of it’. 

Right from the beginning, I sensed that my struggles were often dismissed and not being taken seriously and I just had to learn to cope with the joys of being female, as the doctors suggested. Even though I was living my own personal horror movie every month and my mattress looked like it needed to be cordoned off with crime scene tape, the doctor took it very casually and gave me that tilted head look as if to say, “Go home, you dramatic female”.

It wasn’t long until I started to feel defeated by my own body even as a child. I blamed myself for not coping well with starting my periods and as I grew older, the periods became heavier and the pains became gut wrenching. I became more and more run down, anxious and drained into my teens and began to experience anaemia and hair loss yet there was still no help to be found. 

It was just me. 

Just the way I was. 

Unlucky, anxious, incapable.

My anxiety began to feel just as heavy as my periods. It felt as if hormones were literally coursing through my veins, bouncing off the walls around me. I was often in pain, tired, and confused about why I felt like my body wasn’t functioning as well as the other girls around me. 

I missed out on a lot of my education. School became a battleground for me, a place where I felt ill-equipped to face the challenges of the day. Not only because my mind and body were exhausted, but I couldn’t cope with the heavy blood loss at school, leaking through my uniform onto chairs and spending my lessons folded over on my desk in pain while anxiety crept in like a thief, stealing away my focus. School seemed just as ill-equipped to deal with my issues as much as I was. The lessons we were given about the menstrual cycle seemed completely unrelatable to my experience, making me feel even worse and support for a student like me was non-existant. 

I lived in my own little world, just trying to get through each day as this struggle became my reality. Doctors told me this was normal, so I pushed through, trying to live as fully as I could while constantly questioning why I wasn’t coping like other girls if what I was experiencing was just the reality of being female.

Looking back now that I have received a diagnosis of stage four, deep infiltrating Endometriosis, I am baffled by the strength that I found to just keep going. I guess what with my undiagnosed disease still being at its early stages and Doctors telling me to just get on with it, I fought it while I could and I worked every day to become stronger and more confident in myself and my body. I eventually found dance to be an emotional outlet and a source of exercise that my body thrived on for as long as it could, completely oblivious to what was really going on inside me. I went to study at a college of performing arts and despite the heavy periods, I was thriving and feeling..dare I say it..Happy. But sadly my new found confidence didn’t last long, although beautiful whilst it lasted. It was as if my body had made it through puberty and I was getting used to being female just as all of those doctors had assured me that I would. I had thoughts of a big, successful future and a creative mind that could invent new worlds and characters and tell stories that could entertain audiences. 

I never thought id spend so much time thing about my vagina. 

I never dreamt that my own world would become a horror story where I would be stabbed regularly by an invisible monster with an ice pick.

Until one day when it all went dark. 

My heavy, painful periods were battling with me to outshine my success, and what had finally become sort of manageable suddenly got worse, and I will never forget the fateful morning when everything changed as I felt a searing pain piercing through my womb. 

I had, of course, experienced severe period pains before, but the pains that I felt that morning were beyond my comprehension. If rated out of ten, my pain would be a solid twenty. I had never felt anything like it. 

I can only describe it as being stabbed from the inside out and it changed the course of my life.

And that was the real start of my journey in search of a diagnosis. A journey that I had no idea was about to take another ten years. Ten years of begging for help and receiving nothing but medical gaslighting and being made to feel like the pain was all in my head, that I was just a bit dramatic..

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