During their cycles, many women experience heavy bleeding, bloating, cramps, migraines, etc. Many of these symptoms are a normal part of going through your period. However, what many women don’t know is that, in some cases, they can also be a sign of something far more serious.
Grace, a fibroids patient, knows that feeling all too well. Although she was officially diagnosed with fibroids in 2012, she’s been living in pain since high school.
“Every time I had my cycle in high school I would end up in the nurse’s office because I was in so much pain…No one told me I had fibroids. I was just told that it was normal, this is what every girl goes through and so I thought that pain was normal. Every month I would go through that excruciating pain and I thought it was normal,” Grace shares.
The thought that painful periods that consist of heavy bleeding are normal is something that many women fall victim to, including the women in Grace’s family.
“I have two other sisters and they both were diagnosed with fibroids later on in life, but when we were in high school we didn’t know what it was. We just thought it was normal. Even when I spoke to my mom, she had bad cramps as well. So she grew up with it and she wasn’t officially diagnosed,” Grace adds. “Back in those days, they didn’t really go to the hospital for that so my mother didn’t really officially get diagnosed. But after my diagnosis, I concluded that my mother did have fibroids as well.”
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By the time Grace finally got a diagnosis, she was in college. She had spent years being poorly examined by several doctors with no answers or options for treatment besides ibuprofen.
“I was getting sick every month. I would have to be missing class. I would be in so much pain and I was just like this is not normal I need to see a doctor,” Grace recalls.
After undergoing an ultrasound and other testing, Grace finally had the answers she had been searching for. However, she wasn’t exactly sure what fibroids were.
“I didn’t know what fibroids were. None of my friends were talking about it. I didn’t know anybody talking about fibroids. It’s like it wasn’t something you talked about. It wasn’t in the news so I didn’t really know what it was. I was initially shocked because I was like what is this disease? Is it contagious? Is it gonna kill me?,” the spokesperson for the White Dress Project, a non-profit organization aimed at promoting education around uterine fibroids, shares.
Like many of the 80 percent of Black women living with fibroids, the only treatment option Grace received was