Most women can
remember when they were little girls and their mother’s told them about when
they would get their monthly visitors.
We member are mother’s telling us that: “ Known my dear when you get
your monthly visitor that it may hurt some but not much and it will only last
for a couple of weeks.” But what if this was not the case for you. What if your monthly cycle was plagued by
unbearable pain that it left you unable to move, speak, or even landed you in
the emergency room. What if this very rare disease has been affecting millions
of women for years, but little is known about and worst yet little is being
done to bring awareness about it.
While this is the
sad story for millions of women who deal on a daily bases with the disease called endometriosis. Endometriosis is a disease that affects
women’s menstrual cycle. The major of women this disease affects are Caucasian
women who are either tall or thin women with a low BMI index. It is usually
diagnosed in women between the ages of 25 -35, but has been found in women as
young as eleven years old. The exact causes of this disease are unknown. Some
of the symptoms are the following: pelvic
pain, infertility, pain during intercourse, cramping during intercourse, pain
in bowl movements, urination, lower abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation, low
back pain, chronic fatigue, irregular or heavy menstrual bleeding and blood in
urine.
So has a disease
that affects the fertility of women gone unnoticed by the mainstream media and
society for so long? The answer is simple there is just not enough interested
in it. The reason why I say this is because the recent Women’s March that
happened on March 13, 2014 that was supposed to bring awareness to this female
disease only had one thousand participators. This is a shock because the
expected participations were to be one million women. This speaks volume to me
because it means that even us women don’t see it as important of a cause like Breast
Cancer. The reason for this is because
Breast Cancer can be fatal and it deals with one of the main parts of a women’s
body that identify her as a women. Whereas, endometriosis just deals with the
menstrual cycle and a woman’s infertility, but it’s not fatal like breast
cancer.
If this is going to be the continued viewed of
this disease then it is going to be a very uphill battle to get it to be taking
seriously among not only women, their male counterparts, but also the medical
community as well. This means the lack of research on the disease, the lack of
testing for it in young adolescence girls and more importantly the development
of new treatments and medicine will go undiscovered to year’s maybe decades to
comes, which is unfortunate for the many women who suffer from it now. However,
this will prove to be a great lesson, which is if you don’t care about a cause
as important as this one then no one else will.
Reported by
Nadia Johnson
Blogger/Reporter
March 21, 2014
