Diagnosis… FEMALE Why are doctors ignoring our pain?
Kylie Maslen spent 14 years trying to find an answer for the excruciating, debilitating pain that accompanied her period each month. From the age of 13 to 27 she knew something was wrong. “It was like getting gastro every period; I would throw up a lot, I’d have diarrhoea, I’d get migraines and lots of symptoms that I knew other girls around me weren’t getting,” Maslen remembers. “I’d be literally doubled over in pain and I just had this really instinctive feeling that something wasn’t right.”
Some months the crippling symptoms lasted three weeks. She routinely had her appendix checked and took dozens of pregnancy tests in a futile bid to find an explanation. Countless doctors told her it was normal for some women to have more painful periods than others and that she was just “unlucky”.
Maslen wasn’t just unlucky. At age 27 she was finally diagnosed with endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome and chronic pelvic pain.
“It was the third gynaecologist I saw, and she was really well versed in pelvic pain and she made the most enormous difference in my life,” Maslen, now 36,
