The Worst Birthday
**11:30 pm:** The period pains started—not during my period, but that doesn’t stop the pain. They’re not fussy about timing. I curl into the fetal position and pray to Mother Nature to kindly let me sleep. But this prayer goes unanswered as the pain grows like a labor contraction before they yell, "Push!" Within an hour, I am crawling to the bathroom to vomit, scream, and pass out on the cold floor.
The next morning, on my drive to work, I called a doctor friend because the pain was very localised and had flared up when I was not on my period. "Sounds like a cyst rupture," she said. "Extremely painful, but they settle, and within two days, you should be okay." This nagging ache continued for three months, irritating me and preventing sleep, but it was nothing compared to that night, so I assumed I was just healing after a burst cyst.
**Wednesday night, 11 pm:** It happens again. I took two co-codamol and called Dr. Dad to explain.
Picture it: **12:30 am.** The pain has eased. My boyfriend is awake, in his boxers, attempting to look considerate despite being woken up by my yelling and knowing he has to leave for work in four hours. Now, Dr. Dad is standing in our bedroom with a pregnancy test, asking if it is possible that I am having an ectopic pregnancy.
At this point, I have to pee on a stick while my dad and boyfriend make small talk in the bedroom because we are too embarrassed to discuss with Dr. Dad that pregnancy would be nothing short of a miracle. After the longest three minutes of our lives, we establish that I am not having an ectopic pregnancy. We go back to sleep and hope for the best. An hour later, I wake up with a demon eating the insides of my vagina and bum, and all I can do is wail. No painkillers can touch it, a hot water bottle is as useful as a newspaper in the rain, and all I can do is try to keep the screaming to a minimum to avoid the neighbors thinking the foxes are going at it in our bedroom.
So, the next morning begins: sleep-deprived and sore, I head out to work, hoping the worst has passed. After all, it’s just my period. I’m obviously not eating enough spinach, and I haven’t drunk enough raspberry leaf tea to prepare my vagina. I survive my first hour. Then my Year 8s, a truly wonderful class. They are so excited by history; they ask questions, debate topics, write killer speeches, and make my day. Today, I cannot handle any of them. My bit is done, the knowledge imparted, and I settle in to wander while they produce beautiful pieces of work.
Then it hits me. The rocks in my belly pulling me down, stabbing through my cervix, vomit-inducing, head-spinning pain hits, and I am in a room with 30 twelve-year-olds. I need help, and I need it five minutes ago. I email everyone I can think of. After nobody responds within 14 seconds, I break the rules, get my phone out, and start texting. I plead for someone to walk past my classroom to help. It takes every bit of my energy to stay in my chair and not curl up on the floor. Twenty minutes of changing the timer to elongate the writing task and wondering if I am more likely to be fired for leaving the room or screaming blue murder and holding my vagina, my angel arrives. I get up and walk out, yelling, "I’m going to A&E!" on my way out.
I arrive at hospital and the rigmarole ensues: all the blood tests, questions, and examinations. This time, no one can diagnose me with being on my period; that finished last week. In your face, fuckers! Now you have to find out what’s wrong with me. Everything moves slowly due to the junior doctor strike, but I am put in a lovely little room with IV painkillers to wait for a surgical assessment.
My experiences are nothing special, and I am sure many women with this illness have similar stories. So, what are we doing to change it? It is clear from my experiences that workplaces are not equipped to support people with endometriosis. Endometriosis is considered a disability under the Equality Act of 2010, but due to a lack of understanding of the illness, research, and treatment, workplaces are often not equipped to support people. Endometriosis is often very temperamental, and flare-ups can hit within seconds with absolutely no warning. So, with this in mind, a regular risk assessment and occupational health recommendations are often useless to someone with endometriosis. Since COVID, many women have the flexibility of working from home, but what happens to those that don’t? As a teacher, there is no work-from-home option, no flexible hours, and I am restricted to when I can go to the toilet. When speaking to a friend recently who is doing her PhD, she requested that the seminars be available online to support her studying as she cannot leave the house during a flare-up. This was agreed to, but she was asked to give 2-3 days' notice if she was going to be unable to attend. This is not accommodating her endometriosis. If we had 2-3 days' notice before a flare-up, we would prepare like doomsday preppers and book a few days off work while batch-cooking macaroni cheese. But we don’t. I have spent a morning in a carpet shop organizing a carpet fitting and the afternoon in the hospital, screaming while having painkillers administered. We would love some notice, but we don’t get any, so how are we going to give it to our workplaces or educational institutions?
If I were to write the things I needed:
- Access to emergency teachers taking my class at the drop of a hat
- Cover work set for me when I can’t come in at the last minute
- Regular toilet breaks
- Being able to sit down more while teaching and the students continuing to do what I need them to.
Now, I have an incredibly supportive workplace, but if they were to accommodate all these things, I wouldn’t be doing my job. So, what do I do? Find a job that pays the bills but does not bring me the sense of joy and purpose that teaching does? Or be a flaky teacher who leaves students with regular cover and jeopardizes the quality of their education? I don’t have the answer, but I do know that this contributes to the feelings of lost identity that so often accompany chronic illness. But I digress; I’ll definitely be coming back to that.
Back to the hospital in January 2024: the tests have been done. It might be Mittelschmerz, painful ovulation (not as fun as the name makes it seem). Eventually, I head over to the Surgical Assessment Unit, and with only two pokes of my stomach, I am diagnosed with appendicitis. It’s about to burst, and I am being admitted for 7 am surgery. They can’t do it right away because I have stuffed my face with chocolate brownies and chicken sandwiches. They could do a CT, but that would be unnecessary radiation, which is not good for my reproductive bits. I wait for a bed in a big comfy recliner while my mother argues with me because I have been rude by not allowing her to bring all the Indian relatives into a surgical ward at 10 pm. Dr. Dad is not convinced. There is no indication of appendicitis, and he thinks the CT is necessary. Rule number one: always listen to Dr. Dad.
**11 pm:** I have my CT. It is completely clear. No appendix removal necessary. However, now I don’t belong to any department to be looked after, so I head back to A&E for them to decide where to send me next. An emergency gynecology consultation is decided upon, and more discussions of pregnancy and STIs ensue. My fourth diagnosis is PID, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. My infection markers aren’t raised, and my cervix looks normal, but just in case, this is what I am going to be treated for. I am given IV antibiotics and sent home with three more courses to complete, with instructions to come back in three days for a transvaginal ultrasound.
Ahhh, my birthday morning! A 2 am discharge, pain, and four courses of antibiotics to enjoy. Welcome to the last year of my twenties. I wake up to red, raw skin. Heat radiates from every part of me. I look in the mirror, and Will Smith as Hitch in the pharmacy aisle looks back at me. I have had an allergic reaction to the antibiotics and am still in excruciating pain. I called Dr. Dad and cried.
At this point, I have had four diagnoses (all wrong), nearly had an unnecessary operation, and am no better than before. Now, please do not think I hate doctors. I don’t. I think they work incredibly hard, and most of them genuinely want the best for their patients. In my mind, my dad is the most incredible human on the planet. However, their incorrect diagnoses are due to a worldwide lack of knowledge of female health alongside less funding and fewer specialties focusing on how to manage these illnesses. While this may seem to be a female-only issue, it is problematic for men too. Many clinical trials and studies have been predominantly done on men, which remained the case until the 1970s. This has led to a higher understanding of the impacts of medicines on men and a lack of understanding in women. Furthermore, some illnesses are more highly attributed to women, which leaves men struggling and unable to access the help they need. This is especially prevalent in mental health issues, which are more commonly diagnosed in women, leading to men struggling without the correct access to the help they need. However, my main point of contention here is that clinical bias exists so heavily within the medical profession that women receive less extensive investigations and are far more likely to be diagnosed with psychological illnesses when they present with physical symptoms. So, how do we balance this out? We know that clinical bias exists, and there has been plenty of research into why it exists, but yet I am still four diagnoses in with no clarification as to what is actually wrong with me and no effective treatment. So, why are doctors prescribing medications without the correct information? Is it because they want to be able to say that they have treated me the best they can? Is it because they genuinely believe that these things are wrong with me? Or, most scarily, is it because they do not believe me and think that these are, in fact, psychological problems?
