Helen McLaughlin says she was suffering so much that she would burn herself with a hot bottle “just because that was a nicer pain than the one that I was in”, IgbereTV reports.
But when her medical scans kept coming back clear, the doctors in London made her feel like “there’s nothing wrong with me — it’s in your head.”
Her story will be familiar to millions because the disease plaguing her — endometriosis — is suffered by one in 10 women worldwide.
But endometriosis is so under-researched, and often takes so long to be properly diagnosed, that it has come to symbolise how illnesses that only affect women have long been ignored by a historically male-focused medical establishment.
McLaughlin was 16 when she had her first symptoms of endometriosis, where the tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus instead grows on the outside.
When she told her GP in Britain that she was having her period every other week, he prescribed her the pill.
When she was 25 — nearly a decade after that first misdiagnosis — she started getting increasing pain after her period — “a quite intense pulling feeling in my tummy”.
A year later it had spread to her legs and she was “in pain 24 hours a day, seven days a week”.
“I had difficulty walking in and out of hospital, I couldn’t work, I was put on 25 tablets a day — just pain management.”
Change only came when a friend of hers said they had heard of another person with similar symptoms who had endometriosis.
However when McLaughlin mentioned endometriosis at her hospital, “they were really dismissive” and she was again discharged with painkillers
