Agony that women live with for years

WOMEN are often told they have normal menstrual pain when they have endometriosis, an intensely painful condition caused when womblike tissue starts to grow elsewhere in the body.

Research shows there is an average of 7.5 years between a woman first seeing a doctor about symptoms and getting a diagnosis.

In September 2017, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) issued new guidelines warning the medical profession to revise their approach to women with the condition. As NICE’s guidelines director, Dr Mark Baker explains: ‘Women are too often told by doctors that they are making a fuss about normal period pain, leading to years of unnecessary distress and suffering.’

Accountant Helen McLaughlin, 32, from London, was referred to a gynaecological surgeon by her GP two years ago when her normal period pains became increasingly severe and were affecting her every day of the month.

‘It felt as though my womb was trying to escape from my body with unbearable pelvic pain that radiated down to my knees. Walking and especially climbing stairs made it worse,’ says Helen who fainted from pain into her boyfriend’s arms at Liverpool Street station in 2014.

Helen, pictured, selfdiagnosed endometriosis. ‘They were fairly classic symptoms,’ she says. But the hospital specialist insisted they were normal menstrual symptoms refusing for more than a year to do the diagnostic test, a laparoscopy where a camera is inserted into the pelvic area via an incision near the navel. ‘He was the expert. I had no voice,’ says Helen.