Quotes About Endometriosis

I have something called endometriosis, and I was told by my gynecologist that I needed to go on a specific diet if I didn't want to have any more surgery.

Endometriosis is notoriously difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are perverse. A woman with mild endometriosis can be in an agony for days every month (or every day for every month); women with the severe kind can have hardly any pain at all, like me.

In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.

Research into endometriosis is as scanty as funding.

The pain has lessened with age, but never goes away. Now the doctors give it a name—endometriosis. Their tone when talking to me is always one of judgmental solemnity, as if this sickness is a curse given to me because I never found a husband, instead of a curse that prevented me from getting one. Or maybe I have always just imagined this in their voices.

The endometriosis was not just in my reproductive organs; it was everywhere.

All that is known for sure is that endometriosis is endemic and that it cannot be cured. Management is the best hope. This makes for treatments that are, if I am being polite, based on trial and error. If I am feeling less generous, they are shots in the dark.

Acupuncture was a saving grace. It helps more than anything else I tried. Everyone with endometriosis should give acupuncture a shot, at least once.

I feel special. Most women will have only one menopause, and they will hate it. I will have two, and when the second one comes, I will know what is coming. I am having my extra menopause as a cure. I have endometriosis.

And for government and a bunch of men in government, frankly, to get between a woman and her provider is downright dangerous, especially when most of them can't even spell endometriosis, much less tell you what it means.

But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind. [Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]

I had bad endometriosis when I was younger, and a doctor told me I'd have a lot of trouble getting pregnant.

When you say 'the menopause', people understand; when you say 'periods' to someone, even if they don't understand the mechanisms of it, they will understand. But if you say to someone 'I have endometriosis,' they haven't got a clue what it is. There is such a lack of tying it together with what is normal versus what is not normal with a period.

I am a sufferer of endometriosis. I didn't want any young women to go through what I went through. I thought that people should know about it.