My journey with chronic pain began around
7 or 8 years ago when I first started getting
dysmenorrhea. Of course, I didn't know
that it was chronic pain at the time, only
something unfamiliar and a monthly event
that would stop me from going to school,
social events, and the like for a few days
out of every month.
Although my symptoms werent as bad in
my preteen years, I remember a being told
off by my father as he told me that, in the
future when I was working, I wouldn't be able
to take 3 days off every month, and I needed
to get better at managing my symptoms.
When I started my degree, I also started
my journey of being diagnosed with
endometriosis. This took a long time,
and required for me to see a lot of
different people.
Often I had just been prescribed different
OCPS long tern neural-damping pain
medication, and even an anti-depressant
class of painkiller that I later found they
had stopped prescribing it as an
anti-depressant because it tended
to have the opposite affect.
Having started a symptom diary, this
greatly helped my communication with
health professionals because for the first
time, I wasn't just telling them and they
were trusting my word, but they could see
an actual tangible record of my experience.
I required three months of a symptom diary
to get a diagnosis, and in general I found
it helped rne to recall my own experience
as I tended to block out and ignore when
my symptoms were bad, leaving me with a
warped perception of how well I was
actually handling my life.
Unfortunately even
