Women’s Health Matters

This is my last post written before the surgery that I had earlier this week. As I mentioned in my last post, I expect I’m currently in a post-surgery drug/pain haze and I won’t be writing for some days. With our upcoming election, this post is too important to wait until I’ve recovered enough to write.

If you had a sprained ankle, no competent doctor would tell you that the cure is to run a marathon. Yet, myself and thousands of women have been given that advice for decades. Throughout the last 25 years, when I’ve raised concerns about my health otherwise competent doctors have shrugged or advised, “sex will fix it,” or “it’ll be better once you have a baby.” I learned from this that I had to suck it up and live with the pain and fatigue.

Five years ago, I got fed up with living with it. It no longer made sense to me that I had to suffer while other women didn’t. For the first time in my life, when I raised the same concerns I’d raised years before, I actually got a meaningful response (from the same doctor that once told me having kids was going to be the solution). I started with pelvic floor PT after which, for the first time in my life, I was able to wear a tampon. I also got connected with specialists who not only listened to my situation, but where able to tell me there are other options besides sucking it up and living with it. One of those options is the surgery I had this week.

It is scary to choose surgery while my body is already compromised with Long COVID. However, there are several reasons why I did:

1. I’ve already waited 25 years for meaningful treatment. I don’t want to wait any longer.
2. There is very little knowledge about what Long COVID is and how to treat it and there’s similarly minimal understanding of why and how some women develop endometriosis. So no doctor will be able to confirm or deny this yet, but my observations of the timing of my relapses and good days suggests that my Long COVID and endometriosis are exacerbating each other. If I get the only known treatment for the one, maybe the other will also improve.
3. If we continue to elect candidates that believe women are sex objects and not full humans, then we will continue to fall back into the dark ages of women’s health. Depending on the outcome of the election, women may lose access to not only abortions and IVF, but also treatments like endometriosis surgery.

If I am ever fortunate enough to have a daughter, I hope that she grows up in a country where a doctor will never tell her to have a baby to cure her health just as they wouldn’t tell her to run a marathon to cure her sprained ankle.

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Feature image credit: care by Muhammad Ikraam from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)