Dearbhail Ormond was diagnosed with endometriosis after seeing 20 doctors across 18 years.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13639593

A woman who suffered excruciating periods has said she was diagnosed with endometriosis after seeing 20 doctors across 18 years.

Dearbhail Ormond, from Surrey, also grew up experiencing extreme fatigue and pain after sex.

She said she began experiencing painful periods from the age of 16, and after seeking advice from a range of medical professionals, she received no answers.

The 42-year-old has since given birth to a baby girl and founded a company to help other endometriosis sufferers.

Endometriosis is a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus.

  • Mycatiskai@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    8 months ago

    I sometimes wonder how long they spend in medical school teaching about issues that are only to do with women and those having female genitalia. Story after story talks about doctors disregarding pain levels in women, ignorance of basic anatomy they should know, and drugs that were developed and proven to work but only in men, never tested on women.

    My sister’s pain levels were ignored for over a year until she was to the point of being mentally, not with it, if they had run some tests the previous year they would have caught the cancer that was growing in her brain. Instead she was just sent home with a stronger pain killer until the tumor was so big that she was acting abnormally and her social worker insisted that the hospital run tests and they finally found the glioblastoma. A month later she was gone.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OPAEnglish
      5·
      8 months ago

      I’m sorry to hear about that, it sounds like a grim time.

      I’m pretty sure women’s health problems do still get waved away (overtones of the whole hysteria business), although with female friends and family that I’ve seen getting treated, I can’t really fault the initial diagnosis and treatment, although it helps we have a women’s hospital.

      Unfortunately, the poor state of the NHS has meant that everyone has taken a hit on the diagnosis and treatment front, with it hitting the already overlooked parts of the population hardest. So a mess has only just been made worse.

      • Mycatiskai@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        8 months ago

        Once the tests actually got done she had surgery within a day to remove the massive tumor, she got a few weeks of normalcy before it grew back completely again and she was comatose. She saved three people by donating her organs. She was a pretty damn good human being and I miss her.

        I looked back in our WhatsApp chats and found the day where a year earlier she mentioned having a massive painful migraine lasting days and the doctors just gave her drugs and moved on. I won’t ever tell my parents because they think it came out of nowhere and that they couldn’t have done anything. Likely they couldn’t have done anything but to know she was likely sick for an entire year would break my mother more than she already is.