It took over two decades to get my painful periods diagnosed

I know I'm far from the only one. Now Naga Munchetty is on a mission to get women's health taken seriously

I know I’m far from the only woman to have lost a lifetime of time and energy to agonising periods, bleeding buckets and, let’s be frank, to have got through an absolute ton of towels and sheets (and mattresses!). Like many of us, I thought this was just “normal” – and I was told so, over and over again by countless doctors. So, I invested in boxes and boxes and boxes of superplus tampons, wadded up the pads, should have taken out shares in Nurofen and hoped like hell I’d get to work before the dam broke. (Spoiler: I often didn’t.)

To some of you, this might sound like I’m exaggerating. To many others, it won’t. I am through all this now. And you know what was “the cure”? Menopause. A couple of years before I became perimenopausal, I was finally – finally – diagnosed with polyps, fibroids and adenomyosis*. (*Hold that thought, there’s much more to follow below).

Scroll forward to May 2023 (almost exactly two years ago) and the British journalist Naga Munchetty hit the headlines because she spoke out about exactly that: thirty years of painful periods and having just been told she had adenomyosis. I was gobsmacked. I had never heard of adenomyosis before I was diagnosed and, until Naga, I had never heard of anyone else having it.

Nor had Naga. And she, like I, was furious. Furious at the amount of her life she’d spent in pain. Furious at how long it had taken her to get a diagnosis. Furious at how many hundreds of thousands of other women were in the same boat. Now she’s written a book, It’s Probably Nothing, which is part memoir, part call to arms, and it’s brilliant. I only wish this book had existed 25 years ago, when it could have changed my life. You can hear Naga talking about this experience, and the whole women’s health crisis, on this week’s episode of The Shift with Sam Baker podcast.

Anyway, when Naga “came out” with adenomyosis. I wrote about my own experience. The piece got a massive response at the time, but there were far less of you then – almost 20,000 less – so, as The Shift with Sam Baker approaches its second birthday on Substack, I thought I’d take the paywall off and share this piece again as a bit of a bonus. (Don’t worry, this week’s Thursday newsletter is still coming!) In the meantime, I’m hoping some of you will find some solace in a shared experience.