![]() ![]() She was just 27 at the time, and when she had surgery mere days later, her doctor removed an endometrioma the size of a grapefruit. One month, I basically spent 2 days lying on the bathroom floor, unable to move or eat or drink," the naturopathic doctor, now 41, says. Thanks, though.īefore you say, "Oh yeah, I have bad cramps, too!" consider Amy Day's experience finding out she had endometriosis: "Over the course of the year after I went off the pill, each month my period got worse than the month before. Familiarize yourself so you can be a better friend-or realize you need treatment yourself.Įndo pain is not a "normal part of being a woman," so there will be none of this "suck it up" nonsense. Here are a few of the many things only a woman with endo truly understands. What are we afraid of, a little period talk? Psh. In the meantime, if we're going to help the 6 to 10% of women of reproductive age who have endometriosis, we're going to have to stop being so hush-hush about it. MORE: 9 Highly Effective Solutions For Yeast Infections Part of what he and his Boston Center for Endometriosis colleagues are researching is surgery-free ways to diagnose the disease early on. One of the biggest challenges for doctors, Laufer says, is there's no way to test for endometriosis in its earliest stages it shows up on scans only when it's advanced, which makes preserving fertility even trickier, he says. Endometriosis is in no way "just" cramps (more on that in a sec) not only is the pain debilitatingly severe, it's also often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, constipation, back pain, pain during sex, and particularly heavy menstrual bleeding. We do know that endo can begin at a girl's very first period, and that the most obvious symptom is pain with menstruation "in the magnitude of killer cramps," Seckin says. MORE: 13 Ways To Lower Blood Pressure Naturally There seems to be a genetic link in some instances if women in your family have always had painful periods, it's worth considering the diagnosis before you write off your pain as a family legacy. But we-frustratingly-don't know why a woman would experience retrograde menstruation in the first place. The thinking goes that every month when a woman menstruates, some of the blood that leaves the uterus escapes into the pelvic cavity that surrounds the reproductive organs instead of leaving the body. There's a ton we still don't know about why this happens, but the predominant theory is called retrograde menstruation. ![]() Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play Cysts may grow on the bowels, bladder, or, more rarely, even infiltrate the lungs. Growths on the ovaries, called endometriomas or chocolate cysts, can permanently damage a woman's fertility. ![]() The immune system is altered in some way in women with endometriosis so that no matter how much swelling and inflammation the body sends to the pelvic cavity to try to clean away the blood that doesn't belong, the implanted cells are still able to thrive, acting almost like cancer in many ways. "Every time a woman has a period, there are these micro-periods happening," says Tamer Seckin, MD, a specialist in endometriosis in private practice in New York and the co-founder and medical director of the Endometriosis Foundation of America. That's because they grow-and bleed-as if they were still at home in the uterus. "Those cells implant in those other locations and cause pain if left untreated or undiagnosed." (Looking for more health news? Get your FREE trial of Prevention magazine + 12 FREE gifts.) ![]() Laufer, MD, a Harvard professor, chief of gynecology at Boston Children's Hospital, and the director of the Boston Center for Endometriosis. It wasn't: "The doctors guessed I had had endometriosis for at least 10 years, unchecked, undiagnosed." She was 33.Ī little endometriosis 101 for the unfamiliar: Cells that typically grow in the lining of the uterus, called the endometrium, can end up in other places, where they really don't belong, says Marc R. She'd been having increasingly heavy and frequent periods, but she thought it was "part of being a woman," she says. Endometrial growths had gotten so large they were pressing on her kidneys, restricting the flow of urine, which had led to a kidney infection that caused the sky-high fever. After 9 hours of tests for life-threatening concerns like a ruptured appendix, she found out she actually had stage 4 endometriosis. She ended up in the ER after the fever hit 104☏. "So when I found myself very fatigued and lethargic with a bad fever, I thought it was just the weather." "Winters here in Chicago are brutal," she says. When Michelle Johnson was diagnosed with endometriosis, she thought she had the flu. ![]()
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