A woman said doctors compared the insides of her body to a "tangled sticky cobweb”.
Laura Debney, 37, has suffered with painful periods from the age of 11 but was told this was “normal”. The pain spread until her whole body was in agony "all the time".
She was diagnosed with endometriosis aged 26. Endometriosis is a condition where adhesive tissue grows in other places such as the ovaries and fallopian tubes, and bonds them together - and has no cure.
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The civil servant from Cardiff, had multiple surgeries over the years to remove the adhesive tissue but she said it would just grow back worse each time. She can only work for five hours a day because the pain becomes too much for her to focus, and she also struggles to sleep at night.
Laura says she finds sex too painful and hasn't been able to sleep with her partner of 10 years for over a year. Laura explained: "When I first started my period, it would feel like someone had punched all the way through me to my back.
"I was told the pain was normal for girls, and I just 'wasn't used to it' - but eventually the pain was all over my body, all of the time. When I had surgeries after being diagnosed, the doctors found all my organs were bonded together.
"They said it was like they were tangled up in a sticky cobweb - they tried to remove all the adhesions, but it just grows back again. As time has gone on the pain has just become greater - and it's permanent. My boyfriend and I haven't had sex in over a year because I'm always in pain."
It took years for her to get an appointment with a gynaecologist, and Laura quit all her much-loved active hobbies such as hiking and airsoft because they caused her too much pain. When she began to notice her condition worsening yet again, she had to go private and had another surgery in 2019 which revealed the adhesions had spread beyond her reproductive system to her bowels.
This meant even a full hysterectomy wouldn't fix her problems and the doctors were out of options. Since then, Laura has been prescribed progressively stronger medication to help her live a normal life despite chronic pain.
But due to limits on how much she can take in a day, she still finds the condition "debilitating" and has been forced to reduce her hours at work. She said: "I don't meet the criteria for disability benefits, so financially I'm in a lot of debt at the moment."
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