Endometriosis

With endometriosis now diagnosed, spoken, and written about much more, research into its correlation with migraine is expanding. Physicians are not yet sure ...

It is a peculiarity of endometriosis that the pain suffered isn’t necessarily related to the visible extent of the disease. In addition, participants with both endometriosis and migraines experienced more dysmenorrhea than those without migraines” (Wu). "It was 1980 when I had surgery for endometriosis, and my case was extreme… On average, it takes seven to 11 years to be diagnosed with endometriosis from the onset of symptoms and seven years for an accurate diagnosis of migraine. It was not until I found an excerpt from the late Gail Mazur’s memoir Giving up the Ghost, which I read initially more for her accounting of migraine, that I first read a personal account of someone living with not one but both of these diseases. In my 20s, I saw an OB-GYN, who tried a couple of medications to help with the cramping but never seemed to take in the severity of my experience. Eventually, he trusted me, and we went back in for exploratory surgery, only to find that, yes, there was new endometriosis and that one of my ovaries had even tried to start growing again. I did really well for about a year, before my symptoms reemerged—all seemingly impossible, even to my physician, who had always been so believing and compassionate. I was so irregular and unpredictable that it sometimes lasted a good part of the month. In the 1980s and 1990s, nobody spoke of endometriosis. I felt so helpless and The doctor had to be right; I just had difficult and irregular periods, which often lasted 14 days.