Georgie’s Wanderlust

I felt inspired today to write and share about living with endometriosis, a disease I’ve had for 15 years now. Earlier in the day I was at the gym and spent 15 minutes on the exercise bike to warm up. When I got off the bike I could feel an intense pain starting in my lower abdomen and lower back. I grabbed a mat, lay it down on the floor and crouched next to it.

I quickly found myself face down on the mat with the pain rapidly increasing and I realised I was having (what I like to call) an episode. Why was I experiencing this pain now? My period finished 3 days ago, I don’t usually get this intensity of pain in the other days of the month… I gathered my things as I felt a wave of nausea hit me. My apartment is only a short walk from the gym, I needed to make it there.

By the time I got to the lift (elevator for my North American friends) of my apartment building I was uncontrollably sobbing and hunched over in pain. I crawled in my apartment door and lay on the bathroom floor, crying and drooling and pleading for the pain to stop. And it eventually did. It was quick this time. Brutally intense, yet short lived. It’s different for me every-time.

And that was the start to my day.

What is endometriosis?

Endometriosis is a disease that causes tissues similar to the INSIDE of the uterus to grow abnormally OUTSIDE of the uterus. These growths can be found all through the abdomen, commonly growing on the outside of the uterus and ovaries. It can grow on the bowels and bladder, it’s even been found growing on lungs.

Endometriosis is an absolutely debilitating condition that causes extreme pain during menstruation, and for the unfortunate during the rest of the month too. It is now said that 1 in 7 women and people who were assigned female at birth have endometriosis in Australia.

If you are unfamiliar with endometriosis, you can read more about it on Mayo Clinic.

Time for story time

When people ask me about living with endometriosis I often feel stumped for words. “It’s painful” “It makes me nauseous” “I can’t do anything when I’m in an episode”. It doesn’t really feel like I’m able to get across the full extent of what it is like when I’m going through these episodes, and the other affects that endometriosis has on me in my day to day life.

Here are a few snippets from over the years of what it has been like living with endometriosis.

The bathroom floor in Thailand

In 2019 I travelled South East Asia with my then partner. When we were in the north of Thailand we rented a scooter and did the Mae Hong Son loop (absolutely fantastic if you’re ever thinking of going, I highly recommend!).

One morning I decided to do a workout in the main room of our accommodation. About ten minutes in I felt that too familiar feeling in my lower abdomen, so I stopped crunching my abs and knocked on the bathroom door. My then partner was mid way through his shit but by this point I was bawling and demanded to be let in.

He pulled up his pants and let me in to sit on the toilet. I then made my way to the floor of our $20 a night rooms bathroom and sobbed into the tiles, my drool connecting my face to the floor (sound familiar?).

It eventually passed, as it always does. I was then left traumatised that a little bit of exercise can bring on such an intense physical pain that I am at the absolute mercy of.

Over the years it has left me with a complicated relationship with exercise. A fear of the unknown hangs over me, and when I experience these intense moments of extreme pain, I am frightened away from exercise for a while. Yet exercise is one of the few things I think helps me overall with living with endometriosis. It’s a double edged sword.

My time working with endometriosis

If you know me personally, or if you’ve been following along with my blog, you know that I have worked in the forestry industry for many years now in Canada. I plant trees there, and I love it.

However, there have been several moments over the years when my endometriosis has absolutely wiped me out during a planting season. Rendering me incapable of working, feeling small, inadequate and emotional, and in a lot of pain.

I’ve had to take days of work because I am so exhausted from spending a sleepless night writhing in bed in agony, wishing for rest and no more pain. Come morning when the pain has eased off and I’ve stopped vomiting long enough to keep the pain killers down, I’m too defeated and exhausted to go out onto the block (forestry worksite) and plant trees. So I stay home. And I eat chocolate and I allow my body time to heal from the trauma it so frequently goes through.

It can be in these moments that I feel emotional and frustrated and inadequate, I want to be able and capable of going to work everyday. I don’t want a medical condition to control my life like that.

I’ve had others days were I’m on the block that the pain has overtaken the painkillers and I just have to be there. I work an hour from anything most of the time and we drive to the job site together as a crew. The option to leave isn’t always there. Sometimes I can retreat to a work truck and lay in the back seeking refuge. I’ve also spent hours sobbing at work and just continuing the day to the best of my shattered abilities. I just push through and eventually the pain stops when it decides it will.

The five hour episode

In 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, I was out camped by a river in British Columbia with my then partner. We were required to spend two weeks isolating before we began that years tree planting season. So we loaded up the truck camper with food and headed to nice little rec site tucked away a bit over an hour from Rocky Mountain House.

My period fell over the time we were there, as such I was taking my usual four hourly dose of painkillers. One morning I just couldn’t get comfortable. The pain was rising and even though I’d had painkillers, they weren’t working. I told my then partner that I really wasn’t in a good way and that was it. For the next four hours I was in absolute agony, the pain would not fucking stop. I was at a loss. I didn’t know what to do. It radiated through my lower back and down the inside of my thighs. No position was comfortable, I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and begged for the pain to stop.

It got to the point that my partner packed up the campsite and drove me the over an hour drive to the hospital. Plastic bag in my lap I vomited my way to the hospital. And five minutes out, I could not believe it, the pain finally started to ease off. I felt like a batshit crazy person. Why did it stop when we were right there? Basically at the hospital. It felt as though the demon in my belly me knew and didn’t want to be exposed.

We still went, I masked up and had to go in alone because everything was so tight in those early days. I sat in a patient room in my boyfriends oversized hoodie and a floor length skirt with the zip undone (the only thing I could allow to touch my tender belly) with my head hanging low.

The doctor came in and I explained to him what happened. He sympathised with me and I remember him saying “You’ve obviously been through a lot”. He then recommended me to go on birth control to help with my condition.

We left the hospital and bought a pizza.

Day to Day life

While the excruciating pain is usually reserved for when I’m menstruating, other endometriosis symptoms will creep into my day to day life as well.

“Why?!” I so often think, even saying out loud. It’s not fair, the rest of the month is my time, I don’t want pain and inability to rule my entire life. But at times it does.

Bowel movements are extremely painful.

My lower belly becomes incredibly bloated, shrinking my wardrobe options way down.

When I ovulate it’s like a knife is stuck in the centre of that months ovulating ovary.

Extreme fatigue leading up to my period.

Exercise can randomly bring on extreme pain.

An inability to be intimate (sorry for the overshare).

All of these things add up, and eventually take a mental toll as well as a physical one.

This blog post has been sounding rather drab.. let’s turn it around for a moment.

I really do my best to stay positive and make it through life with the little and the big wins. While living with endometriosis has affected my life massively, I have still been able to do really great things.

I’ve hiked for days on end in the Himalayas, Andes, Grampians, and coast of BC. Places that have given me some beautiful memories and wonderful feelings. I’ve swam with the Great Barrier Reef, in glacial lakes and in the Caribbean Sea. I can and still do work an extremely physical job that I genuinely enjoy. I travel often to some truly incredible places, meeting amazing people along the way, seeing some extraordinary wildlife and some big cities. I’ve camped under the stars and giggled with friends on top of mountains.

When I wake up in the morning I love having my hot cup of tea. I love standing under a hot shower and feeling the water on my back. I love having a really good yin yoga session and laying in peace on my mat at the end. I savour those moments of feeling good. Because there really are so many of them. While I have this difficult condition, I still have been able to live a full life. I hope anyone reading this with endometriosis (diagnosed or undiagnosed) knows that life isn’t all downhill with endometriosis. Celebrate your happy and feel good moments! They are such a big part of life! That’s what life is all about!

What I do to help my condition

Living with endometriosis for such a length of time, I have tried a few different approaches. One of the most successful being Traditional Chinese Medicine, something you might know as Acupuncture.

I spent months working with a TCM doctor in Melbourne, going in for regular Acupuncture sessions, and also taking daily Chinese herbs. It took time, but after about 3 months I got to the stage where I didn’t have to take pain killers for the subsequent 3 months. It was amazing. I felt so light and free. And then as I am a traveller at heart, I packed up my bags and flew to Nepal to study yoga and go trekking in the Himilayas.

Towards the end of my time there, having been away from acupuncture for a few months, the pain crept back in. I started back on my pain killers and that was that. The inconsistency of my condition makes it so hard to know what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong.

I do know and truly believe that the acupuncture and herbs helped me. It’s not a quick fix though, it’s something that needs to be maintained regularly as part of a continuous lifestyle. I just don’t always have access to regular treatments when I’m moving around all of the time, there’s not always a TCM practitioner where I am.

Another avenue is hormonal therapy. I won’t go too far into it, as everyone’s bodies are different and what works for some won’t always work for others – I must say hormonal therapy is not for me.

This can be inclusive of the birth control pill, or other hormonal pills that aren’t contraceptive but specifically designed to regulate hormones for conditions like endometriosis. I tried the birth control pill at the encouragement of my doctor in 2021 and nine days in I was so depressed I felt like I could die. I then went on to try the hormonal therapy at the guidance of my gynaecologist, it was a similar affect (not as intense as birth control), I just never felt like myself, like I was a shell of who I truly am.

They are not something that agrees with me so I will not take them.

In an attempt to nourish myself I have tried incorporating different foods into my diet, eliminating foods, taking supplements. Anything. Anything to help me not writhe in pain every 24 days (the length of my cycle) or at other random times in the months when the devil feels like visiting.

My best advice for food for anyone going through something similar, living with endometriosis, is to listen to your body and eat what feels best for you. There is so much contradictory information on the internet, from doctors, from the people close to us, it can be so confusing! It’s best to just listen to your body and eat foods that make you feel good. Every body is different and there isn’t one special diet to rule the world. Do your own research and find what feels good for you!

These are some of the supplements I have taken over the years, with varying results:

• Chasteberry
• Turmeric (I add the powdered form to smoothies)
• Fish oil capsules
• Milk thistle capsules – as a liver detox for a month
• Probiotics – to assist with proper digestive function
• Prebiotics – to feed the probiotics
• Magnesium & potassium for electrolytes – a healthy and functioning system will deal better with stresses from disease

When I take supplements, I overall feel better. I have more energy, my bowels function, and I can sleep better. It’s hard to know exactly what is helping as every single month is different for me when it comes to endometriosis. It’s unpredictable and erratic. I’ll have a great month where I only had to take painkillers twice and I think great! What the heck did I do this month to be blessed by this?

Pending surgery

The last time I was in Australia in 2021 I was seeing doctors and specialists to receive help for my endometriosis. My gynaecologist diagnosed me officially with endometriosis during this time, even though I felt I had known well before that.

Let’s look at that for a moment, it took 13 years from my first signs of endometriosis until I was actually diagnosed with the condition.

Now I wasn’t at the doctors every week for it, but over those years the most common phrase I heard was “you should be on birth control”. I refused for a long time, until I had my experience with hormonal treatment and birth control in 2021. As I said earlier, it’s not for me.

Now I have returned to Australia to stand by my best friend as she gets married, to visit my beautiful family and friends. And to hopefully have surgery for my endometriosis.

My gynaecologist has been incredibly understanding of my condition, and I feel safe and comfortable in here care. At her referral I have an in depth endometriosis ultrasound coming up next month. This will give my gynaecologist/surgeon some insight into wtf is going on inside of me, and if she recommends a second surgeon.

I’m hopeful that I can find some relief through surgery.

Thanks for reading

Thank you for reading, this was a long one! If you or anyone you know is going through this, I hope the journey has been kind to you. There are options out there to have a comfortable life living with endometriosis. There are people who will take your pain seriously, people who can help you.

And don’t forget to really feel those feel good moments! Laugh with your friends, move your body in a way that feels good for you, eat the yummy foods that nourish your tummy and your soul!

All of the good luck to you,

Love Georgie ❤