I almost fainted at the school Christmas Mass when I was 14. The endless standing and sitting and kneeling, combined with holding in the helpless laughter that inevitably accompanies being at Mass with 800 other teenagers, and the puke-inducing agony in my back and abdomen meant one of my fellow gigglers had to pull it together to escort me aside where I could writhe and moan to my heart’s content. The school secretary dispensed two paracetamol, which took they edge off enough to phone someone to come and get me.
The nearly fainting was not really a monthly occurrence, but the debilitating pain was.
My period pain was at its very worst when I was a teenager, starting at the tender enough age of 11. I remember rolling around in agony on the sittingroom floor while my brother looked on helplessly. At least we weren’t trying to box the heads off each other. My mother understood the distress and was often on hand to administer painkillers and hot water bottles, but that day my parents were out. Medically, the attitude towards the pain was largely “grin and bear it”. I was prescribed the anti-inflammatory Ponstan on and off; Ponstan was this mythical drug that was the go-to for many GPs faced with a teen with unmanageable cramps. Taking the contraceptive pill as a pain preventative was sometimes floated but rarely acted on. It was a baby blocker, not a medicine! God forbid there might be a medicine aimed at relieving the very real monthly suffering of millions of teenagers.
Exercise in humiliation
As I got older, the pain lessened. Not a huge amount but enough to be manageable about 70 per cent of the time. I’m always prepared with painkillers – Feminax or Nurofen Plus during that window when codeine was easier to procure over the counter, and then a cocktail of paracetamol, ibuprofen and Buscopan when asking for Solpadeine became an exercise in humiliation or deception in front of a pharmacist just trying to do their job. Codeine is a powerful and addictive drug that’s easy to abuse, I know, but my God does it take the edge off those cramps. Some months I decide to treat myself and approach the counter with a steely resolve, armed with my script of “yes I have tried paracetamol just give me the precious Solps”.
Slightly ashamed
I would say my period pain has always been on the spicy end of moderate. No worse than that. And I say this as someone who once mistook the unbelievable pain of kidney stones for the onset of a period. I have considered myself lucky because I don’t have endometriosis. In fact, I feel slightly ashamed of my dramatics over my own pain when I’m not one of the people who has been forced to live with the symptoms of “endo” without a proper diagnosis or treatment pathway. It’s a chronic condition that causes tissue similar to the lining of the womb to grow outside the womb, on the ovaries or bowel or in the pelvis, for example. And given that the lining of the womb grows, breaks down and sheds, this can cause debilitating and life-changing pain and issues for sufferers, including infertility.
We're all now familiar with the saying that `if men could have abortions you could have one at an ATM'
Endometriosis is as common as diabetes but consistently underdiagnosed and poorly treated. Its symptoms can be dismissed as “bad periods” or a result of stress or contraception. For women and people with uteri, because agonising pain is often expected to be grinned at and borne, the suffering can go on for years. It’s part of a wider pain bias that exists in medical care, with studies showing that women’s pain is often underestimated – which is even more common for women of colour – while medical research is routinely skewed towards treating men.
Abortion
We're all now familiar with the saying that "if men could have abortions you could have one at an ATM". It's facetious but familiar because it has an underlying truth. Not disregarding conditions that are undertreated and underfunded across the sexes, it's probably safe to say that if men suffered from endo, it would be a higher priority in terms of diagnosis and treatment. I'm reminded too of hyperemesis, a condition made famous by Kate Middleton and often described as "severe morning sickness". When I hear the phrase "abortion is healthcare" I think immediately of the stories I've read of people who've chosen termination because the hell of hyperemesis made them suicidal. In fact, the pregnant are often asked to grin and bear it to the nth degree – invasive procedures, poor maternal healthcare, birthing partners waiting outside in cars…
As if all that isn’t bad enough, we’ve been forced to endure decades of pussyfooting commercials. The year is 2021 and while the world might have just about accepted that women bleed red, not blue, I have yet to see an ad that even glances off the fact that it’s accompanied by seven toxic bowel movements a day. Now where’s the pill for that!