It was the size of a golf ball and threatening to rip through Olivia Phillips’ bowel.
The aggressive growth was one thin layer of soft tissue away from causing a complete rupture and potentially life-threatening sepsis.
It did not need to come to this. Over two years, Phillips had described pain that would “literally stop me in my tracks” to more than 10 GPs, a gastroenterologist and staff at a hospital emergency department.
Her symptoms were repeatedly written off as constipation.
Endometriosis was the single most common disease among more than 2000 accounts of medical misogyny shared by Australian women with this masthead: more than 200 women with the progressive, chronic disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows in other parts of the body.
One woman’s endometrial lesions had all but killed her kidney before her pain was properly investigated. Another said her symptoms were dismissed as normal, despite period pain so severe that she had fainted and knocked her front teeth out. Others were prescribed anxiety medication and diagnosed with depression with no investigation into the physical cause of their distress.
“For so long we’ve seen this gaslighting that’s described by patients, where they’ve presented to a health care provider with a set of symptoms, and they’ve been told it’s in their head, or it’s normal, when it’s not,” said Jason Abbott, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of NSW and chair of the National Endometriosis Clinical and Scientific Trials (NECST) network.
By 2020, two years after Phillips first sought help, she couldn’t sleep for the pain. The 27-year-old could no longer pass bowel movements. She was vomiting so frequently that she was rapidly losing weight.
“It was the only way for my body to remove waste,” she said. “Nothing I was eating was staying down.”
A colleague, seeing her in this state, convinced her to push for a referral for a colonoscopy. It revealed a large pelvic mass compressing her bowel.