Gynaecology waiting lists in UK double, leaving women in pain

The BBC spoke to her in 2023 about setting up her own charity, Menstrual Health Project, external.

A year on, she says she is still in pain and is on the NHS waiting list yet again because she has experienced bleeding after her hysterectomy.

Anna wears a morphine patch to help deal with pain every day.

But for years, she says medics did not listen to her, and told her the pain was “in her head” and that she had to “just get used to it”.

She feels getting a diagnosis sooner would have changed her life: “The delay in my care has cost me some of my major organs.

“Doctors have told me that if they’d caught it sooner, I wouldn’t have ended up the way I am, living with two stomas and being in early menopause at the age of 31.”

In the last three years she made the decision to spend £25,000 on private operations, borrowing money to help.

She counts herself lucky to get private care but feels she was “almost left with no choice” because the waiting lists are so long: “I can be a mum who isn’t just in her bed constantly because she is crippled with pain.”

Endometriosis has “mentally tormented” her for the most of her adult life.

“It is really difficult dealing with a condition where I look absolutely fine from the outside, but internally, I’m just in despair.”