My name is Nadine Dirks; I am a 24-year-old woman from South Africa who has been living with stage 4 endometriosis for over a decade.
On average, endometriosis — a painful inflammatory disease most commonly of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and pelvic tissue — can take anywhere from 4–11 years before diagnosis occurs, with an average delay of nearly 7 years in women aged 18–45, according to an article in Current Obstetrics Gynecology Reports.
For a Black woman, this can be even more daunting and stressful. Compared with white women, Black women are less likely to be diagnosed with endometriosis.
I received an official diagnosis of endometriosis in 2014, after many years as an outpatient at the local hospital. At the hospital — between misdiagnoses, assumptions that I was a hypochondriac, and assumptions that went as far as suggesting my symptoms must be from an untreated sexually transmitted disease — no one showed any real interest in getting to the bottom of what was causing my unrelenting symptoms.
At the time, I was experiencing severe and heavy menses, chronic lower back pain, intense cramps, bloating, headaches, nausea, vomiting, fainting spells, and chronic constipation — yet this was not enough to convince the doctors to look into my symptoms.
They brushed it off, with one doctor going as far as assuming my insistent bleeding and intense pain was due to a “botched abortion gone wrong” just by glancing at me from behind his desk.
He had not even done a physical examination before deciding the fate of the then 18-year-old me.
Doctors consistently gave me paracetamol and ibuprofen and sent me home, insisting that I was fine and nothing was wrong with me. Needless to say, the paracetamol and ibuprofen did very little, other than pacifying my pain levels periodically.
The doctors had even gotten to a point where they insisted my weight was an issue and the reason for my symptoms, but I only weighed 45 kgs, which was perfectly healthy for my height and age.
One Sunday afternoon, I noticed the pain on the right side of my body was worse, and my abdomen seemed bloated. I decided to rest, use a hot water bottle, and take some pain medication to ease the discomfort.
When I woke up the next morning, the pain was much worse. I decided to visit my general practitioner (GP), who insisted on writing a referral letter to my local hospital.
My GP was concerned it might be my appendix and informed the hospital. I arrived, and they sent me for a battery of scans, tests, and examinations to get to the bottom of the pain.
The doctors informed me that my appendix was perfectly fine. However, I needed emergency surgery because they had seen an abnormally large mass on my right ovary.
At the time, they had me sign a form stating they would need to remove the right ovary because it was under incredible strain due to the mysterious mass.
The doctors informed my family it would be a 30-minute surgery, but after 2 hours, my family had still not heard any word because I was still in the operating room.
The surgeons later informed me that once they had a look to see what was happening internally – they had no choice but to open me up entirely, creating an incision from hip to hip.
Aside from the mass they had spotted initially, my fallopian tubes were attached to my uterus, and my bowels were stuck to the back of my uterus, which had caused it to pull downward.
Source: Medical News Today
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