Endometriosis Awareness Week, 2-9 March 2015

A condition unseen for far too long!

So, it’s time to bring it out of the shadows.

The aim of Endometriosis Awareness Week is to draw awareness to a condition that often goes unrecognized and therefore untreated in women. So what is it exactly?

The problem arises when the tissue that usually grows inside the womb starts growing in other places in the body. While the tissue in the womb falls away with a period, this tissue remaining on the outside can lead to cysts and scar tissue.

Endometriosis (en-doe-me-tree-O-sis) is an often painful disorder in which tissue that normally lines the inside of your uterus — the endometrium — grows outside your uterus (endometrial implant). Endometriosis most commonly involves your ovaries, bowel or the tissue lining your pelvis. Rarely, endometrial tissue may spread beyond your pelvic region.

In endometriosis, displaced endometrial tissue continues to act as it normally would — it thickens, breaks down and bleeds with each menstrual cycle. Because this displaced tissue has no way to exit your body, it becomes trapped. When endometriosis involves the ovaries, cysts called endometriomas may form. Surrounding tissue can become irritated, eventually developing scar tissue and adhesions — abnormal tissue that binds organs together.

Do you want to help women with endometriosis? Well, you can and in so many different ways!

This is one disease that I personally suffered for over thirty years, until menopause kicked in. The experience was at times the most painful, debilitating one and yet never truly accepted or even recognized by anyone close to me, including some doctors.

There were times that this disease would be so disabling from pain, it would leave me folded in half, to manage the pain.

Attention to this condition was only achieved once the escalation of symptoms carried so far that bleeding became publically apparent, running through clothing for all to see. Other than those times, most people would of could not ever respect the illness as such – a disease.

Now it’s time to show what you can do!

For more information, read HERE

Information thanks to The Mayo Clinic