A Bit on Endo

I don't think my birth control is working as well as it used to.  It had been my miracle drug for pain management, but it's been slowly sliding downhill lately.  The everyday pain had been gone, but it's slipping back in.  The "that time of the month" pain is getting stronger with each passing month, but luckily pain killers still help.  I'm spotting for several days again before and after AF.  The getting really emotional for no reason right before AF arrives is back as of yesterday.  I wanted to cry all day at the slightest things for absolutely no good reason, and I hate it.

I'm not looking forward to how I'll be when I finally go off the birth control to start TTC again.  (I'm kinda hoping it'll be later this year, but as with everything else, I guess we'll see.)  When I came off to start TTC the first time, it got weird.  My body was doing things it never used to do before I ever started taking BCP.  Beforehand when I was a teenager and in early 20s, I would get debilitating pain at the start of AF that would last for a few days.  I would barely be able to stand upright or walk... I remember crawling to the bathroom all the time, crying the whole while.  My back and bowels were affected.  And the whole time I thought it was my normal because other women in my family were affected the same way.  Never did I know that that type of pain was definitely not normal.

Then I started taking BCP and started to feel better.  I took them for about two years until the ex and I were ready to start TTC.   That's when my body started doing more weird things.  I started spotting at odd times of the month.  It started as a few days after AF left and a few days before she arrived the next month.  It worked up to every day in between, so I was bleeding to some extent every single day.  And I started experiencing mittelschmerz, which I never had before.  It started when it should, when I would be ovulating, but it also escalated, and I was having similar sharp and stabbing pain every single day.

I started doing research, and that's when I first learned of endometriosis.   As I read through the symptoms and realized I had a majority of them I wondered if it could be the reason I'd had so much trouble through the years.  As it turned out, my doctor found a cyst behind my cervix during a routine exam just a couple of months later that was biopsied and confirmed as endo.  Talk about timing.

It makes me mad that I'd never heard of the disease before.  As many as one in ten women have it, yet very few people have ever heard of it.  Had I known about it in my teenage years, I could have taken action then and been spared years of pain.  But I thought it was just my lot in life as part of being a woman.  It also angers me that so many doctors do not have correct information on the disease.  A lot of misinformation is still floating around and some of the things I've had doctors say to me about it still anger me to this day.  Having experienced that, I am certain now that if I do ever have a laparoscopy, it will be done by an endo specialist.

It's interesting to me how this one disease can affect so much of your body.  How it affects more that just the reproductive organs and can disrupt the proper function of others.  When this sciatic pain was at its worst a couple of weeks ago, when I could barely walk without being in tears... I started spotting.  Could it be related?

Anyways, back to the birth control.  I wonder what will happen when I stop taking it again.  Will it be like it was the first time?  Will the pain be the same, or any better or worse?  Will any new things develop?

Will I be able to conceive?