My legs shake and I suffer pain so bad I have to lie in bed for days every month. Yet doctors dismiss my agony – and MILLIONS of other women suffer it too

Last month I was on the train coming into work in London when I collapsed.

I was running late and, as I took the station stairs two at a time, my legs felt shaky and a stabbing sensation began deep in my stomach.

On the train, the pain grew in intensity, until my whole body was gripped by it. Sweaty and nauseous, I couldn’t stop shaking. My eyes went out of focus, my hands and feet numb, as I went into a kind of shock.

The pain was so all-consuming that the indignity of being slumped over and groaning in front of a packed carriage of commuters barely registered.

Then the train jolted and I fell to the floor, the contents of my bag, including the painkillers I always carry, spilling around me. A kind stranger gave up his seat and collected the pills for me and I curled up, clawing at my stomach, until the train slid, agonisingly slowly, into Victoria.

There, I spent two hours in the medical assistance room, waiting until I regained enough strength to get on the train and limp home.

This may sound like some freak medical emergency, but it was, in fact, period cramps. This degree of suffering is becoming standard procedure for me, as it is for some 14 million UK women who experience severe period pain.

Why is it this bad? I wish I knew. No doctor has been able to tell me because I haven’t been able to get an appointment. My local GP is usually pretty efficient, but collapsing from period pain doesn’t seem to qualify as important enough to get an on-the-day appointment.

It’s been suggested it could be endometriosis, where the uterus lining grows outside the womb, wreaking painful havoc in the body, but despite an estimated one in ten women experiencing it, the average waiting time for a diagnosis is eight to ten years.

There’s no non-surgical way of identifying endometriosis and while it’s unsurprising doctors don’t resort to invasive procedures lightly, some 47 per cent of women diagnosed with endometriosis said they had to visit a GP ten times or more before getting an answer.

And so, at the age of 22, I’m reduced to lying in bed for days each month with a hot water bottle, painkillers, and this gnawing, nauseating, depressing pain. And yet our healthcare system doesn’t appear to see anything wrong here. 

While I’m wasting my life like this, five times more research goes into erectile dysfunction, which affects 18 per cent of men, than into period-related symptoms, which affect 90 per cent of women.

Dismissal of women’s pain is spurred on by the poor research – if doctors aren’t taught about the extent of women’s health experiences, they are more likely to dismiss female patients as melodramatic. 

This all means that, even when you do manage to see a doctor, it doesn’t matter how sympathetic they are personally, the broader framework of available healthcare prevents them from doing much.

I managed to speak to a GP about this a year ago. The pain wasn’t at the level it is now, but had been progressively worsening and I was in more than the normal amount of agony.

After waiting months for the appointment, I was told it was normal for periods to get worse as you enter your 20s and that I should try the pill, hoping to reduce the pain by reducing my periods – and not leading me any closer to diagnosis. I was then told I couldn’t take the pill, as I get migraines and the two together would put me at risk of a stroke.

Some 14 million women in the UK experience severe period pain

I tried taking the mini-pill (an alternative which uses different hormones) for a few months, but it comes with much more pronounced side-effects. The constant headaches, nausea and fatigue were just as bad as the monthly symptoms and I was promptly advised to stop taking it.

Everything I tried seemed to cause more problems than it solved and, as the pain wasn’t as bad then, I gave up.

The train episode wasn’t the first time I’d collapsed – that was a few months earlier. Then, I’d put myself on a waiting list for an IUD, which I’m hopeful about (it functions like the pill, but delivers the hormones locally so has fewer side-effects). But I’m still waiting for a fitting and until I clear the waiting list, I’m reliant on increasingly insufficient over-the-counter painkillers.

All GPs seem able (or willing) to offer is birth-control, but even if the IUD helps me manage the pain, that’s still not a diagnosis. Many of the gynaecological conditions which might be causing this carry a risk of infertility or pregnancy complications, both of which are easier to address the earlier you know about them.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to know what’s happening to me, and not be satisfied with simply finding a way to ignore it.

But because my pain is ignored by doctors, I find myself trivialising it myself. Sure, it isn’t fun, but I’ve survived this far, haven’t I? Almost all women experience period pain, and they seem to manage to get on with it without complaining. Maybe I am just being melodramatic? Or maybe we’ve all just normalised women’s pain because women are normally in pain.

But this is about more than just sparing people pain: a report earlier this month put the annual economic cost of neglecting women’s health at £20billion. Taking an economic hit of billions year on year, because no one can be bothered to research women’s health, is nonsensical.

But until anyone can be bothered, I’ll be here, dreading what the next month will bring, and trying to ignore the nagging voice in my head that, despite all the evidence and statistics and painkillers falling out of my shaking hands, maybe I’m making the whole thing up.