How Would My Life Have Been Without Endometriosis?

I had a hysterectomy four years ago, a decision I’ve never regretted. But sometimes I look back on my sixteen years of menstruating and wonder: How would it have been if I hadn’t had endometriosis?

My periods were different

I have six sisters (I’m the second oldest). You can imagine that there were a lot of women menstruating in our household. Out of my six sisters, I was the only one with heavy, painful periods. Even my mother breezed through her periods as much as she breezed through her many pregnancies and child births.

My sisters never understood my hatred for my period. The week before I knew it was coming, I’d reschedule all my social appointments. I’d start to be come anxious: What would my period throw at me this time? How long would it last? How heavy would the bleeding be? Would I have to be in bed for one or two days?

While my sisters were going out living their lives during their periods as if nothing had changed, I was literally disabled for a full week each month. It made me wonder: What would it be like to live with normal periods?

What would a normal period look like?

What would it be like to wake up one morning and notice that hey, in the night my period had arrived? No cramping, or at the very least cramping so mild it wouldn’t wake me up at night. Some bleeding, but nothing that couldn’t be contained by a regular pad or tampon. Being able to go about my day with only the mild inconvenience of having to change a pad or tampon every so often.

I don’t get periods anymore (due the the afore-mentioned hysterectomy), but sometimes I dream of a life with normal periods. Imagine the things I could have achieved! If I hadn’t missed days, weeks, months of my life because of endometriosis pain, how much more successful could I have been now? How much more social, better travelled? Endometriosis has literally robbed me of a normal life.

Understanding leads to empathy

In the same way my sisters could never understand how I experienced my horrendous periods, I could never understand their breezy attitude towards menstruation. For me, it was a BIG deal, for them a minor inconvenience. I think a lot of women with normal periods can’t understand the hellish pain women with endometriosis go through each month. And that’s assuming their symptoms are limited to their periods.

Maybe if people (of all genders) could experience just one period of a woman with endometriosis, we would get more research into endometriosis, better treatments and maybe even a cure. We certainly wouldn’t have doctors telling us our pain is "just in our head". I wouldn’t wish endometriosis on anyone, but I do believe that it’s important that everyone understands what endometriosis feels like. Not just in the abstract way of “painful periods”, “heavy bleeding” which is used so much it has all but lost its meaning, but in the true sense the word. Let everyone physically experience endometriosis for one day and then we’ll talk again.