Last month I was on the train to work in London when I collapsed.
I was late and as I walked up the station steps two at a time, I felt my legs shaking and a stabbing feeling starting deep in my stomach.
On the train the pain intensified until my entire body was seized. Sweaty and nauseous, I couldn’t stop shaking. My eyes went out of focus, my hands and feet went numb, as I went into a kind of shock.
The pain was so all-consuming that the outrage of bending over and groaning in front of a packed carriage of commuters could barely be heard.
Then the train jolted and I fell to the ground, the contents of my bag, including the painkillers I always carry, pouring around me. A kind stranger gave up his seat and collected the pills for me and I curled up and clawed my stomach until the train slid, agonizingly slowly, into Victoria.
There I spent two hours in the medical assistance room, waiting until I had enough strength to get on the train and limp home.
This may sound like a medical emergency, but it was actually menstrual cramps. This level of suffering is becoming standard procedure for me, as it is for around 14 million British women who experience severe period pain.
Why is it so bad? I wish I knew. No doctor has been able to tell me because I haven’t been able to get an appointment. My local GP is usually quite efficient, but collapsing from period pain doesn’t seem to be a big deal enough to get an appointment on the day.
Hannah Drayton collapsed on the train to work last month after experiencing painful menstrual cramps
It has been suggested that it could be endometriosis, where the uterine lining grows outside the uterus and causes painful damage to the body, but despite an estimated one in ten women being affected, the average wait time for a diagnosis is eight up to ten years.
There is no non-surgical way to identify endometriosis, and while it’s no surprise that doctors don’t resort to invasive procedures lightly, some 47 percent of women diagnosed with endometriosis said they’ve had endometriosis ten or more times. had to visit a doctor before they got an answer.
And so, at the age of 22, I have to lie in bed for days every month with a hot water bottle, painkillers and this gnawing, nauseating, depressing pain. And yet our healthcare system doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with this.
While I’m wasting my life this way, five times more research goes into erectile dysfunction, which affects 18 percent of men, than menstruation-related symptoms, which affect 90 percent of women.
Dismissing pain in women is encouraged by poor research. If doctors are not educated about the breadth of women’s health experiences, they are more likely to dismiss female patients as melodramatic.
All this means that even if you manage to visit a doctor, no matter how sympathetic they are personally, the broader framework of health care available prevents them from doing much.
A year ago I was able to talk to a doctor about this. The pain was not at its current level, but had been getting worse and I was in more than normal pain.
After waiting months for the appointment, I was told that it was normal for periods to get worse as you get into your 20s and that I should try the pill in the hope of reducing the pain by reducing my periods – and helping me not bring us any closer to the diagnosis. Then I was told I couldn’t take the pill because I get migraines and the two together would put me at risk of a stroke.
About 14 million women in Britain experience severe menstrual pain
I tried taking the mini-pill (an alternative that uses different hormones) for a few months, but it has much more pronounced side effects. The constant headaches, nausea and fatigue were just as bad as the monthly symptoms and I was immediately advised to stop taking them.
Everything I tried seemed to cause more problems than it solved, and since the pain wasn’t that bad at the time, I gave up.
The train episode wasn’t the first time I had a breakdown – that was a few months earlier. Next, I would put myself on a waiting list for an IUD, which I am hopeful about (it works like the pill, but releases the hormones locally and therefore has fewer side effects). But I’m still waiting for an adjustment and until I clear the waitlist, I’m dependent on increasingly insufficient over-the-counter painkillers.
The only thing GPs seem able (or willing) to offer is contraception, but even if the IUD helps me control the pain, that’s still not a diagnosis. Many of the gynecological conditions that can cause this carry a risk of infertility or pregnancy complications, both of which are easier to address the sooner you know about them.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to know what’s happening to me, and not be satisfied with simply finding a way to ignore it.
But because my pain is ignored by doctors, I find myself downplaying it. Sure, it’s not fun, but I’ve survived so far, right? Almost all women experience period pain, and it seems they manage to get through it without complaining. Maybe I’m just being melodramatic? Or maybe we’ve all normalized women’s pain because women normally have pain.
But this is about more than just saving people pain: a report earlier this month estimated the annual economic cost of neglecting women’s health at £20 billion. Taking a billion-dollar economic hit year after year because no one bothers to research women’s health makes no sense.
But until it can affect someone, I’ll be here, dreading what the next month will bring, and trying to ignore the nagging voice in my head that, despite all the evidence, the statistics, and the painkillers pouring from my shaking hands fall, maybe I’m making the whole thing up.