HOPE. PERIOD: I Have Made My Passion Come to Life

Every heart holds a story. Story is how we relate, learn, and know that we are not alone. Today we are excited to share a period story from Bailie Foster! Bailie is a college student and a fierce warrior for the health of women and girls! Grab a cup of tea, open up your heart, and let Bailie tell you what it’s like to be IN HER SHOES…

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It was summer of 2010 when I got my first period. It was also the first time that I that I heard, "Some women have painful periods," as if debilitating pain is normal. The next 4 years brought increasingly painful periods. My mother helped me find my 3rd and current OB/GYN provider who quickly confirmed his suspensions of endometriosis with a laparoscopic surgery which is an exploratory medical procedure that involves small incisions, inflating the abdominal cavity with carbon dioxide and using a camera to look for tissue abnormalities and manipulate accordingly. This is currently the only definitive way to diagnose endometriosis. Not only had I finally found a doctor who didn't tell me that missing a couple of days each cycle was normal and to go home, but he also eliminated the source of pain by cauterizing, or burning, of the larger endometriosis lesions. Turns out that cauterization is a band-aid for endometriosis because it leaves the edges of the lesion tissue that results in frequent occurrences of regrowth.

My post operation appointment brought what I call "the endometriosis ultimatum" when I was told that endometriosis could only be dealt with in three ways: get a hysterectomy, have a baby, or deal with the pain as it inevitably comes back. At 20 years old I didn't want to choose to have a baby now or never, so I chose to live with the pain which came back within 6 months. By the fall of 2015 the pain had escalated in frequency and severity. My norm was an omnipresent discomfort that disrupted my daily life and each period was only manageable with a pain killer prescription. My mom came across and introduced me to my Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist who has forever changed my life. The greater part of the first year of physical therapy provided blissful relief and gave me hope for quality of life with endometriosis. I thought that my endometriosis was under control, it was handled, and no longer an infringement on the life that I wanted to live, but soon the relief that physical therapy provided started diminishing and so did my quality of life again.

By the fall of 2016 my quality of life was almost nonexistent. I depended on a pain prescription to make it through the workday and socializing activities were out of the question, so I set out on a quest to find effective endometriosis symptom management which also involved sharing my endometriosis journey on my various social pages. An alarming number of women in my small Kansasan hometown left me frustrated with the fact that we all had 3 things in common: we were all led to believe that this condition is rare, we all felt lost and confused on how to move forward once we finally received a diagnosis, and finding effective management is an expensive medical maze with more dead-ends then solutions. Finding solutions was been a team effort as my mom helped me find various temporary pain relief methods and my physical therapist helped me find an endometriosis excision specialist in Gig Harbor, Washington. Excision is a more extensive than a laparoscopy that extracts the entirety of each endometriosis lesion with a scalpel and only taught through additional fellowships outside of medical schools where laparoscopic cauterization is taught.

Traveling halfway across the country is a significant financial feat and so this glimmer of hope sat just out of reach. When my pain prescription could no longer be legally filled in February of 2017, I knew that I couldn’t continue to live my life in the zombie state that I had become. I submitted my patient application to Pacific Endometriosis & Pelvic Surgery, scraped together enough to make the 2-week trip, and on July 17th of 2017 my excision surgery took almost 4 hours. I am fortunate to have friends & family generous enough to help make my surgery possible, but a trip of that caliber is not accessible for most women. My conviction to help other women through their endometriosis journey was fortified during my post operation appointment when I learned that Dr. Mosebrucker found a significant number of legions on my intestines and sacral nerves and classified her findings as borderline Stage IV endometriosis. I left Washington answers and relief from my symptoms, but the numerous women still suffering weighing heavily on my mind.

I showed up to work exactly 2 weeks post-surgery very sore but feeling better than I had in years. On my second day back, I decided that I was too passionate about other women with endometriosis to stay at my dead-end job, so I gave my 2-week notice. I knew that I wanted to help the 1 in 10 women with endometriosis, but I wasn’t sure how to accomplish this. I decided to attend Wichita State and thanks to the help of my professors, networking opportunities, and the abundance of mentorship received I have made my passion come to life. I am the Founder and Executive Director of the Endometriosis Resource Center: a nonprofit for women with endometriosis. We are in the early stages but planning a series of initiatives designed to empower women to advocate for their health through the collective power of shared experiences, education, and accessibility of all endometriosis management options. The pandemic has pushed back our original initiative launch date, but we are on social media! Connect with us on Facebook and Instagram at @EndometriosisResourceCenter, Twitter at @EndometriosisRC, and icterc.com to learn more and join our community!

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A big THANK YOU to Bailie for sharing her story with us today, for educating us, and for helping women and girls who are on the same journey. What an inspiration!

If you would like to share your story with us, send an email to Ginger@SheHopes.org or contact us HERE. We share these stories with you and our sisters around the world to help us relate, learn, and know that we are not alone!

Here’s to HOPE!