Monday 3 December 2012

Suicidal due to endometriosis - an open letter to BBC health correspondents.

Dear all,

Please excuse the group addressing if this email. I contacted you a fair while ago about endometriosis, asking if you would consider covering it, showing how utterly devastatingand soul-destroying it can be. The awareness weeks are always in March.

Three weeks ago today (Monday 3rd December), I put myself through a traumatic injection of Noristerat; I nearly passed out while feeling the jelly-like substance slowly make its way in to my muscle. At the same time, I was terrified that my nightmare of depression and bleak pointlessness because of hormones b
eing artificially altered would return.


I told my consultant this would happen. My taking of the anti-depressant, Duloxetine, is not enough to keep my mind balanced. I haven't bled since the injection, and am not likely to for months but this break from my horrific periods means nothing, just as I said would be the case.
Over and over, I literally beg for help, pleading for something to change. Nothing helps. The pain is constant. Not even a second passes without something in my pelvis hurting, regardless of painkillers (dihydrocodeine).

Yesterday, in the week leading up to what would be (possibly, for my periods are irregular) my premenstrual days, all the bitterness, cruelty, anger, and bile erupted in a sobfest, with me wondering what the point of all of this is.

All the treatments I've tried do not work. Surgeries have lessened the pain ad made periods slightly more bearable for several months but, inevitably, they always, always return to their established torture. Tramadol was a fleeting option, ceased when I developed the initial symptoms of serotonin syndrome. Even a hysterectomy and/or oophorectomy are not guarantees of a painfree life. I may already be infertile. I may never have a chance to find out, if I opt to have the whole cursed lot taken away.

I've just turned 31. I can't work. My Mum is my carer when I am ill with a period. There is no hope of improvement, nor of change, nor of reason to keep doing this. That's how I felt yesterday. Death felt like the only answer, the only action to stop all this happening. Not for the first time, my consultant didn't listen to me when I said this would happen. The angry part of me blames him for this happening, blames him for not seeming to realise I can not indefinitely go through treatments with vague hopes there will be a slight improvement. I can not carry on hoping something will help. What's the point? Why? Nothing changes.

Some people assume it's just a period, idiotic arrogance causes them to tell us to stop moaning, to stop seeking attention, that we are weak and simply not trying hard enough. They don't have the slightest understanding, no sympathy, no empathy.

Please, I beg you, bring the dark world and hopelessness and pure fear of endometriosis and its often horrendous treatments to the attention of people. There are at least two million women in our country with endometriosis. Two million people. Many of them are treated with contempt by others because of lack of knowledge and kindnes. Not every woman suffers terribly, not every woman will be unable to have children, and not every woman will welcome her own demise as the way out after trying so hard to carry on through endless and often silent agony.

Today, I don't want to die. Today, I want to bake cakes using the recipe birthday card and teacupcakes from my lovely friend, Mark. Today, I might begin to crochet something from my Stitch 'n' Bitch book. Today, I might watch more of my beloved Attenborough show me the world I may never see.

Please help people understand how frightening hormones and incurable diseases and ovaries and periods can be. Please report on it. I don't mean to suggest I ought to be the subject but please, just do SOMETHING to help this awful, horrible, devastating thing become more known about, more public, more understood. Please.


Lucy.


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