Endometriosis

Endometriosis pain can be in your back, legs, uterus, sides, in other organs inside of you, and there are different ways that the pain can be treated. The first that I tried was just through completely changing my diet. There are a lot of foods that exaggerate the endometriosis pain by causing inflammation in your body where you may not be aware you could have sensitivities to gluten, soy, dairy, sugar. So cutting these out completely of course makes you lose a lot of weight but also a lot of swelling and inflammation and that was a major way to relieve pain. The more consistently you stick with it, the less flare-ups that you have and overall feel way healthier without any type of medication.

Since I never have had any relief from any of the medications that I've tried to assist with my endometriosis, I've done a lot of research to try and find some alternative methods for pain relief. One of the biggest things I can really recommend is your diet. If you look into an anti-inflammatory diet, that made a huge change for me. I also recommend pelvic floor physical therapy. That was a huge help to me. And then surprisingly, acupuncture. If I'm ever having really bad flare ups, you can actually get acupuncture for endometriosis. And that's something that definitely helps. So I think those three combinations all together have provided me the most relief, especially in contrast to the medications that I had been prescribed.

For my worst pain I would take codeine and naproxen prescribed before my operation and I got a higher dose of codeine because I was going at a bit of a short pace of time. It's not ideal if you've got kids, it makes me feel really spaced out and awful so that was sort of a short-term measure. Normally I will take ibuprofen and paracetamol and sometimes ibuprofen as it helps if you have nausea. Other things that help are having an electric heat pad so you can have heat constantly. This works better than a hot water bottle and also having really long baths is also helpful and exercise more if you can bear it.

Outside of just how I'm eating, I found a lot of relief from a medicine called Oralisa. I was prescribed Oralisa 200 milligrams twice a day prior to my surgery to shrink the size of a fibroid that they were removing. During surgery when they did diagnose stage 1 endometriosis, they decided to keep me on this medicine and since then it completely has stopped my periods and pain. There are side effects because this medicine puts you into premenopause, so you do have night sweats and can kind of take some other add back hormones, but it completely stops your body's estrogen production which stops the growth of endometriosis.