(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Throughout 2014, I visited the doctors twenty times.

I had been booking appointments to talk about the symptoms I was living with. Weight loss. Stomach cramps. Rectal bleeding.

The symptoms were debilitating. They would cause chronic constipation which would last for days and at times I’d be crippled over in pain.

Every time I sought advice, I was turned away. I was told it was probably just hormonal. Probably just periods. I probably had an eating disorder.


I went back again and again disputing this, struggling to put my case across. But I was ignored, because I was an 18-year-old young woman who was just going through ‘women’s troubles’.



Fast forward a year and I was rushed down for emergency surgery to have my large bowel removed, after it was found to be close to perforating. I had been unknowingly living with ulcerative colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. I was about 20 minutes from death.

I don’t know what’s scarier. That I was close to death, that my large intestine had been literally rotting away inside of me, or that the doctors didn’t even bother to check everything was okay, simply because I was a young woman who was probably just a ‘hypochondriac’ (as one doctor called me).

But you know what else is terrifying? The fact I’m not alone.

So many other young women’s symptoms go undiagnosed and dismissed simply because of their gender.

Holly suffered with an ovarian cyst which went undiagnosed

Holly first went to the doctor in January, after her period hadn’t arrived. She thought she may habe been pregnant, but took a test and it came up negative. She decided to go to the doctor when her period was two weeks late, expecting they’d give her a blood test.

Instead, the doctor suggested she should do an STD test and wait to see if her period reappeared, despite her being married and having only ever had one sexual partner.

Holly says she was severely bloated, to the point family members were assuming she was pregnant. She also had ‘strange bubbly sensations’ in her stomach and stabbing pains.

‘Given that nobody has examined me properly or offered me any support, I began to wonder if I had been pregnant but miscarried, and by the time they checked me properly, nobody would be able to tell,’ she told Metro.co.uk.

Three months passed with no period before it ‘returned with a vengeance’.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Holly said: ‘After several weeks of continuous, heavy bleeding, I went to the doctor in desperation and four months into my troubles, I finally had a physical examination.

‘She discovered a polyp and I was referred to the hospital to have it removed at some point.

‘I thought there was an end in sight. Meanwhile, the bleeding got heavier and heavier, until one night I was late at work and I realised that I had bled through a night pad in just over an hour.



‘There was blood all down my legs and my trousers. This was not a usual situation for me, and I decided to visit A&E to be on the safe side.

‘After a five hour wait, they sent me home, telling me that it was indeed a polyp issue, but that they couldn’t help me because nobody from the gynaecology team was in on a Friday night and my issue “wasn’t important enough” to call them in for.

‘The indignity of sitting there with no underwear on, my legs spread, while staff gathered round to look at the polyp – knowing they had no intention of helping me, was harrowing. I went home at 1am with stained clothes and no hope.’

The bleeding continued over the next four months. Holly’s hormones went ‘haywire’ after being prescribed pills to stop the bleeding, and there were moments when she felt she was ‘losing her mind’. The situation deeply affected her mental health and she sunk into a deep depression.

She finally had an appointment to have the polyp removed seven months after the issues started. The procedure was successful. However, an ovarian cyst was discovered, which is still being treated.

Had it been picked up earlier, Holly would have been saved a lot of pain and trauma.

As a result of being dismissed, Holly’s fertility could now be a concern, and she says she’s been ‘treated like an inconvenience’ when following up test results.

Holly recalled: ‘I had to call again when the bleeding restarted, as it had been going on for nearly eighty days and I couldn’t cope any more.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

‘They called me back in to see them and prescribed me more pills, which left me in agony for several days, barely able to walk.


‘It was clear the consultant hadn’t read my hospital notes, as he brushed off notes from the radiologist who did my scan saying that there was a pool of blood in my uterus, saying “It will probably drain by itself.”

‘The radiologist told me it would definitely need a procedure. He wasn’t interested in the double-sided A4 notes I had put together for him either.

‘He took a biopsy of my womb lining, which I found painful, and when I cried out, he said: “Oh well. I’ve probably got a better sample.” This from a man who has worked in gynaecology for several decades. It was inhumane.

‘Afterwards, when I told them I was feeling hysterical, prone to bursting into tears and had even hit my husband in a fit of rage, he said: “This isn’t politically correct, but it sounds like PMS.”

‘Having been through PMS for 15 years before this happened to me, I knew this wasn’t normal.

‘When I went behind the curtain after the procedure, I heard him talking to a colleague. His comments included: “We don’t want her going into A&E and calling my secretary every five minutes.”

‘He must have been aware I was in earshot. I went home and sobbed. I had to chase the biopsy results after ten weeks with no news. Thankfully nothing out of the ordinary was found.’

Doctors have now admitted that Holly’s case is ‘unusual’ and they don’t know exactly what is wrong with her. She describes the whole ordeal as being ‘traumatic’.


‘Before this happened to me, I was a happy, busy person with an active life,’ she said.

‘My old life is a distant memory. Now, I have put on weight, become withdrawn, anxious and hard to be around.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

‘It has impacted on my family, and affected my work so much I’m surprised I didn’t lose my job.

‘I am only just starting to feel like myself again, but I’m due back in for a check-up on the ovarian cyst in a few weeks, and I’m terrified that he will upset me again or they will try and discharge me when they haven’t fixed the problem, only masked it with the contraceptive pill.’

Holly believes she was not taken seriously because she is a woman.

She said: ‘Is it normal practice for a GP to offer a married woman who has only had one partner an STD test, as a FIRST port of call, when their period vanishes? It was demeaning.

‘The system is overstretched, and while I feel greatly for the majority of staff who work very hard under difficult circumstances, I’m tired of not receiving proper care.

‘It’s not an over-exaggeration to say the utter neglect I experienced ruined my life, and I’m only just starting to pick up the pieces, 14 months after my initial symptoms.’

She added: ‘There should be a female health specialist in every GP surgery, with an open mind, time and a willingness to really listen.

‘I wish I had the courage to complain about my consultant, but while I’m still under his care, what can I do?

‘I don’t want my care to be put at further risk. It’s an awful position to be in, feeling like I can’t speak out.’

Laura lives with endometriosis and adenomyosis

Laura had symptoms of endometriosis and adenomyosis since her very first period, but going on the contraceptive pill at a young age to treat her acne masked some of the symptoms.

For the past six years, Laura has been extremely ill. Too ill to work. She has had debilitating fatigue and incredibly painful periods.

‘At its worst it feels like someone grating and setting fire to my uterus and surrounding organs,’ Laura tells Metro.co.uk.

‘I sometimes get contraction-like pains that leave me in the floor unable to move for several minutes.’

(Picture: Ella Byworth)

She continued: ‘My fatigue always gets worse before my pain does. I can get so bloated I look pregnant. I have to take laxatives daily to tackle my constipation.

‘If I don’t I get shooting pains down my legs. I have constant pain in my right shoulder from diaphragmatic endometriosis and constant hip pain.’

Laura, who also has M.E, says her symptoms were first dismissed four years ago when her chronic pain started. It started with hip pain, but was widespread during her periods.

She was sent to a rheumatologist and was investigated for a year. She was also sent for lip biopsies to rule Sjögren’s syndrome because she had dry eyes.

Laura tells us: ‘My blood tests showed raised levels of inflammation. But not high enough to be concerning.

‘I was told it was probably down to my M.E, despite the fact it had never been raised before my pain started and it stayed raised ever since.

‘At my final appointment my symptoms had progressed and I was in terrible pain during my periods and extremely fatigued the week before and during my period.

‘It took me a week to recover from this. I basically had one week a month where I wasn’t suffering because of my period.

‘I told him this. I emphasised it strongly. But I was told this was normal for fibromyalgia – a condition he had diagnosed me with five minutes before.

‘He had been thorough in his testing. But he had only tested for things that fell within his field. My complaints about my periods hadn’t sent up any red flags.

‘I asked him if there was anything I or they could do to help me. He said I was already doing everything I should.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

‘He meant it to sound like a pat on the back, a well done. But I wasn’t coping with how bad things had got and I broke down in tears when he said this.

‘His response? He called a nurse in to hurry me into an empty room where I could pull myself together and said goodbye. I was discharged.

‘The nurse was nice and said she’d come back to see me, but I rushed off before she did. I felt humiliated at being hidden away because I was upset.’

Laura says another problem arose when her rheumatologist explained to her GP that they hadn’t found anything. Everyone trusted the rheumatologist, and therefore Laura went on being ignored.

But a year and a half ago, Laura developed a new symptom. Pain during sex. She sought help from another GP immediately.

She said: ‘This didn’t fit. She sent me for a transvaginal ultra sound. The nurse told me everything was fine, nothing to worry about. Luckily, when I went back to my doctor she wasn’t having that and sent me on to a gynaecologist.

‘They offered me a laparoscopy to investigate. But they said “one of the risks of having the surgery is that we won’t find anything and you will have had surgery unnecessarily.”

‘They didn’t tell me about any of the other risks of surgery, except in a hand-out they gave me.

‘I felt like I was being told again that nothing was wrong with me, and I started to believe them. I doubted myself.

‘But my partner and my GP reassured me. There was something wrong.

‘When I came out of surgery the surgeon was visibly shocked at how bad it had been. I had stage four endometriosis, it was all over my pelvis and abdomen. My pelvis was frozen with adhesions (scar tissue).

‘I went to a more specialised surgeon for excision surgery (the gold standard in treating endometriosis) and found out I also have deep infiltrating endometriosis on my bowel, endometriosis on my diaphragm and my uterus looks adenomyotic, which teamed with my symptoms led to my adenomyosis diagnosis.’

While Laura says her diagnoses were a relief, she has become so ill that she is mostly housebound.

‘I had been told before any of my diagnoses by a neurologist that my illness was a manifestation of my mind,’ she explained.

‘Then somebody saw inside of me and saw something very wrong. It was validating. It meant I could move forward with trying to manage and treat it.’

Since her diagnoses, Laura has had surgery, lives with chronic pain, and has to take a lot of medication.

Unfortunately, due to how advanced her adenomysis is, she will now need a hysterectomy to cure the condition.

Laura feels her diagnoses were held back due to them both being ‘women’s conditions’.

She said: ‘As soon as I said period, doctors stopped listening.

‘My main problem was that I had a condition that isn’t taken seriously because it’s a women’s health condition and it’s “just period pain”.

‘I think each doctor I went to about pain believed I was in pain. They perhaps didn’t believe I was in so much pain and I was seen as hysterical for crying over something that was ruining my life.

‘But I don’t think they considered endometriosis because they didn’t take the condition seriously or else they didn’t know enough about it.’

The ongoing dismissals of women’s health are causing serious consequences. In hopes of getting to the bottom of things, we had to find out exactly how GPs work. Why is it that so many women are being fobbed off with the excuse of ‘women’s troubles?’

Dr Helen Webberly, who runs the online healthcare service My Web Doctor, says hormones are an easy catch for GPs in the case of female patients.

She explained: ‘It’s certainly the first place they look and this is mainly because so many things can be traced back to a hormone imbalance, from mood swings to stomach cramps and everything in between.

‘We all know that many NHS doctors feel overworked and stressed, and perhaps sometimes we wish we had a bit more time to explore our concerns in more detail.

‘The real danger comes when GPs dismiss the fact that the root cause could be coming from somewhere else.

‘This dismissive reaction, experienced by many women, can put them off even going to their GP in the first place for fear of being fobbed off or made to feel like hypochondriacs.’

Dr Webberly continued: ‘The truth is that no one knows your body better than you. If you experience symptoms that are unusual for your body get them checked out. Inform yourself about potential causes.

‘For example unusual bleeding down below is all too often blamed on the pill or contraception but could it actually be an infection.

‘Speak to your GP about getting your cervix checked for erosion for example, or ask for tests to rule out anything more sinister.

‘You may be surprised at the positive response that this knowledge elicits.’

Dr Webberly adds that stress and depression are also often blamed on hormones. However, a competent doctor will carry out an in-depth case history to address the symptoms.

She added: ‘When hormones are at play, in cases of PMS for example, women are almost embarrassed to admit that they are suffering, as if to do so would be to admit defeat.

‘The truth is it is a very serious and common problem which can be made worse at times of stress, it is also treatable.

‘Admitting you need help is not a sign of weakness and your GP is primarily there to support you.

‘If you find they are not providing the care you need then you are perfectly entitled to ask to see a different GP.’

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