“The next time I went to the surgery [doctor’s office], I shuffled in like an old lady. A locum [resident] was on duty and he told Mum to drive me to hospital straight away.”
Jeanette was given an emergency laparoscopy, keyhole surgical procedure where a camera is inserted through the abdomen to see what’s happening inside.
A laparoscopy is the only way to confirm endometriosis—and this is what happened to Jeanette. “The doctor said he’d scraped as many fragments as he could from my lower abdomen—on my ovaries and my bowel. But what he said next shocked me. He told me the best thing would be to get pregnant. I was an eighteen-year-old virgin at the time!”
What the doctor was getting at—albeit in a seriously flawed bedside manner—was a way to suppress the condition in some women. Pregnancy means no ovulation or periods, which has been known to halt the disease for a few years.
Instead, like many women with endometriosis, Jeanette was given a course of hormones to stop ovulation. It propelled her into a fake, temporary, menopause.
“I had hot flushes,” she says. “But for the next four months I was completely pain-free, which was wonderful.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Six months after finishing the treatment, the pain was worse than before. “I went back to the doctor on crutches,” she says. A few days later, she was lying on an operating table having the rogue endometrial tissue cut away.
“I’ve had three laparoscopies since then,” Jeanette told me. “It’s extreme, but it works.” She’s taking the contraceptive Pill, which helps too.
When—and if—Jeanette decides she wants a baby, she could have a problem. Between 30 and 40 percent of women with endometriosis are infertile. Exactly why remains a mystery—just like the cause of endometriosis in general.
Gill, thirty-six, took the Pill for ten years before coming off it eager to start a family with her partner Matthew, forty. But rather than a positive pregnancy test, she endured excruciating menstruation month after month.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, she began bleeding from her rectum, too.
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