I was told for fourteen years that my periods were normal and in March I had a surgeon tell me my insides were fused together, and I want to write down the fourteen years.

Thirty-six. Diagnosed with endometriosis in March of this year, stage four, by laparoscopy, which is the only way it gets diagnosed, which is the central fact of this entire post.

Let me do the timeline, because the timeline is the argument.

Age fifteen: missing school two days a month. My mother takes me to our family doctor. He says some girls have it worse and suggests ibuprofen and a hot water bottle. My mother, who had the same thing and was told the same thing in 1979, accepts this, and I want to be clear that she was doing her best.

Nineteen: I pass out in a university bathroom. Health services, a pregnancy test, a prescription for the pill. The pill helps, genuinely, for about four years, and this is the part that did the most damage, because it hid it.

Twenty-four: pain during sex. I mention it to a GP. She asks whether there's stress in my relationship.

Twenty-seven: the pain stops being cyclical. It's now about twelve days a month and includes my lower back and, bafflingly, my right shoulder — which I now know is referred pain from the diaphragm, which I now know is a recognized presentation, which is in the literature, and which three doctors did not connect in six years.

I get an ultrasound. It's clear. I am told it's clear in a tone that means we're done.

Thirty-one: a gastroenterologist. Six months of investigation, a colonoscopy, a diagnosis of IBS. I accept this for three years. I change my diet in eleven different ways.

Thirty-four: a new GP, a woman in her thirties, who listens for nine minutes and says the word endometriosis out loud, the first time any clinician has ever said it to me. Referral to gynaecology. Fourteen-month wait.

Thirty-six: surgery. Stage four. Adhesions involving the bowel. Something called a frozen pelvis, which is a phrase you don't forget. The surgeon told me afterward, kindly, that this takes a long time to develop.

Fourteen years. Not misdiagnosed once — managed, repeatedly, by reasonable people, each of whom did a defensible thing in an eleven-minute appointment.

Here's what I actually want to say, which isn't about doctors.

I lost the ability to describe my own pain. Somewhere around twenty-five I learned that if I said it was bad, nothing happened, and if I said it was very bad, I was anxious. So I started downgrading. By thirty I was walking into appointments saying "it's uncomfortable" about something that had me on a bathroom floor the previous Tuesday.

I trained myself into a register that produced no results, in order to be the kind of patient who gets taken seriously, which did not work either.

My husband is the one who noticed. In 2023 he said: you told the doctor it was a four. I watched you not sleep for two nights. That sentence is why I went back.

What I'd tell a twenty-year-old: keep a written log with dates and a number, because your memory will betray you in the room and the log won't. Take someone with you. Say "I would like this documented in my notes" — it changes the conversation and I wish I'd known it at twenty-two.

And know that the only diagnostic is surgical, so "your ultrasound is clear" means almost nothing, and you are allowed to say so.

I'm four months post-op. The pain is about seventy percent better and may come back; this is a management disease, not a cured one. And I am angrier than I expected to be, not at the doctors, but at the fourteen years of being a woman who learned to make her own body sound smaller.