The Aftermath of Covid on Endometriosis Patients

Recently, there's been some awful articles going around about the rise of the chronic illness community and how we're lying about how ill we are, and that we're encouraging others to believe that they are also ill.

So today, if you're questioning how you're feeling, or you're worried that it's all in your head, or you're fearful that you won't be believed, I wanted to give you some research on why your health may have been declining in recent years, or why you now have three or four extra chronic conditions added on top of your endometriosis.

It's not all in your head, and you're not making it up.

So I started my coaching practice just months before COVID began.

If you've been following me for, you know, a while, I've been doing this podcast for about 12 years, or a decade, or, or something like that.

I've been working in endometriosis for 12 years, and blogging about it and, you know, working in endometriosis charities, et cetera.

But the coaching practice I started just before COVID began, maybe six months or something like that.

When I first started, I would have clients come to me looking for help with symptoms such as pelvic pain, pain with sex, period pain, PMS, fatigue, and bloating.

Across the board, these would be the most common issues, the issues that, you know, you expect to see within endometriosis.

I did have a handful of clients who would come to me with a broader range of more complex issues, such as vomiting in the mornings, skin rashes, shortness of breath after eating, dizziness, chest pain, et cetera.

And when I say complex, I mean they were, you know, they were quite mysterious symptoms.

We couldn't quite pinpoint where they were coming from or any rhyme or reason, and they weren't your standard endo symptoms.

But as I said, this was limited to a relatively small number at the time.

Now, the clients who were coming to me looking for help with the typical endo symptoms like pain would often start to see dramatic improvements within one to three months.

I mean, I would have clients, you know, literally, this wasn't rare, I would have clients have a pain-free period or a really low pain period within a month or two.

Now, that's not the case for every single client, but it wasn't abnormal.

And then COVID happened, and a slow change began, which then snowballed.

Bit by bit, I started getting more and more clients with these extra symptoms, and other symptoms too, and as COVID went on and then went away, it got to the point where 90% of my clients had these issues, and they were problems like hives or rashes, new food reactions, extreme brain fog, and absolutely debilitating fatigue.

I mean, many of them had to stop working, um, even had in-house carers.

Exercise intolerance, many of them not being able to even walk for more than a few minutes at a time, not being able to leave the house on their own.

Dizziness, feeling faint, blood sugar struggles, migraines and headaches, breathlessness and air hunger, palpitations and a racing heart, nausea, retching, or vomiting.

Feeling like they had the flu all the time, mood changes, especially worsening PMDD, and I mean, I could keep on going, swelling of the hands and feet, purple feet, struggling to shower, struggling to stand in the shower for long periods of time, and many more symptoms.

Now, I had already trained in postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, as well as mast cell activation syndrome, as we had covered it in my SIBO training because these are root cause conditions or SIBO.

So I already knew about them, and I had done further training because I had suspected these conditions in my more complex clients in the earlier days of my coaching, and they were diagnosed as such.

So at that time, there wasn't really the research linking endo to these conditions that there is now, but I had suspected them, and these diagnoses were confirmed.