March is Endometriosis awareness month, and I wanted to draw your ears to previous podcast episodes we have share taking with Emma Cox is the CEO of Endometriosis UK and we’ve spoken a couple of times about the work she does to raise awareness and offer support I also spoke to Claire who tweets as @EndoLady about her challenges living with the disease. I’m delighted to say, Claire is now pregnant after dealing with Endometriosis and Andenomyosis for years.
Then there is the topic of Adenomyosis which is a condition that affects 1 in 5 women and also knows as the ugly sister of Endometriosis
Listen here to my chat with Dr Vamsee who published the first-ever paper that showed this impact back in 2012 and is keen to talk more about this condition as his findings have shown that women with this condition can have their pregnancy rates reduced by 50%.
This is a huge huge factor in implantation failure and unfortunately, many Doctors STILL don’t test for it. So women are having to undergo IVF cycle after cycle without any cause found for why they are not falling pregnant.
Dr Vamsee talks about how Adenomyosis presents itself with symptoms similar to Endometriosis such as painful heavy periods. He also explains how it can be detected with an ultrasound or MRI scan.
I also spoke with a lovely lady called Janita Lawrence about her book ‘The Underachieving Ovary,’– she also had a heart-shaped uterus and Endometriosis.
Sounds like the start of a bad joke! It also suggests a pretty complicated infertility diagnosis wouldn’t you say. You’d assume there would be no happy ending here.. which is where you would be wrong. Meet Janita Lawrence, author of The Underachieving Ovary who shares her fertility journey with all its many hurdles. The Under Achieving Ovary is Janita’s story of her longing to be a mother, her frustrations and agony having to deal with the pain from the Endometriosis and the strain it put on her relationship. She had given her partner, Mike, the responsibility of her pain management, which put an incredible strain on their relationship.
Janita shared how she managed through the different stages of bad news, where she went to for support and how she managed to stay hopeful despite what was going on. You’ll hear us mention an online forum in South Africa called Fertilicare Support, which we think has since been dissolved as Janita has written to me since we spoke to say she can no longer find a link to it online.
We’ve got plenty more like this so be sure to subscribe via your favourite podcast app Apple Podcasts, SpotifyAcast and Castbox Or wherever you find your podcasts
