Hello! I'm new to this forum and I was looking for some opinions on whether or not my symptoms could be endometriosis-related. I have an appointment with an OBGYN on Wednesday, but I'm such an anxious person that I wanted to do some more investigating to make myself feel a little less crazy about this whole thing. Please bare with me, I'm terrible at summarizing so this might be a bit long. But I just want to be as detailed as possible.
To start, I've always had very heavy periods. I have to use super plus tampons and I usually soak through those within the hour, even leaking if I'm not extra careful. My cramps are never intolerable (I have a high pain tolerance), but definitely uncomfortable to the point that if affects me and my decisions to do anything for the first few days of my cycle.
And for years, every handful of months or so, something would go wrong and I would have such excruciating pain in my abdomen. It would literally knock me to my knees and I'd go white, have the chills, become light-headed and dizzy, and just cry because it hurt so much. I always felt like I really needed to use the bathroom, but would sit on the toilet and could never do anything for a long time while the waves of sharp pain hit me. Eventually, I'd use the bathroom and there would be a lot of diarrhea. And I would feel fine after a while. I always thought it was because of something I ate.
Fast forward to just a few months ago, the same thing happens to me again, but it's accompanied with vomiting and I almost completely black out. This happened at the tail end of my period. It passed after half an hour or so, but the ache in my abdomen refused to go away. I decided to go to the ER the next day because I couldn't eat and they said they thought I had Crohn's Disease or IBS. I had a colonoscopy done a few weeks later and they said I was clean, then pretty much just gave me laxatives for Chronic Idiopathic Constipation. To this day I cannot use the bathroom without using the medicine and I've NEVER had this problem before. My diet hadn't changed, so I didn't know why I'd suddenly need a million grams of fiber in order to have a bowel movement.
I actually decided to look into more possibilities of what it could be when I noticed I had a dark brown discharge a week and a half after my period, followed by uncomfortable cramping. That'd never happened to me before. Then I found information on endometriosis and saw symptoms I was experiencing that I didn't even know could be an issue because they were so normal for me. Heavy menstruation, always constipated and bloated unless I take laxatives, fatigued, gassy, lower back pain, tailbone pain, leg pain in my quads and knees, and pain with deep penetration (it feels like a something tore open deep inside and aches for a long time afterward). I also had frequent headaches and migraines before switching to a ketogenic diet and when I'm on my period, my vaginal area, upper-inner thigh, and butt will go numb and tingly.
As I type this, I have a pressure on my pelvic area and there are random sharp flashes of pain like I'm being jabbed. I mainly feel extremely uncomfortable. Does anyone else here experience this?
