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Dismissing Dysmenorrhea

By Caron Lindsay | Thu 30th September 2021 - 9:01 pm

So, if you have never had bad period pain, how can I convince you that it really is horrible?

You know what bad toothache can be like?

That sort of immersive pain experience that completely consumes you.

There is very little you can do to get relief. Painkillers barely take the edge off.

Concentrating on anything is virtually impossible.

Thankfully, bad toothache doesn’t come along too often.

But period pain, which is kind of like toothache in the abdomen comes along roughly once a month. I know people who are in absolute agony for a couple of days.

On the Hysteria podcast last week, former White House aide Alyssa Mastramonaco described her lifelong search for the optimum combination of methods of relief for her horrible monthly pain.

When I was a teenager, I used to get such bad pain that I would be sick and sometimes I was at the point of passing out.

This is seriously nasty. And research into alleviating Dysmenorrhea, to give it its medical name, has been relatively sparse and not very well funded.

I was once sent home from school because it was so bad, but I never did that again after getting warned within an inch of my life by my mother.

I was lucky that it got a bit better when I got into my twenties, but some people suffer all the way through their menstruating years.

If you are one of the unlucky ones, you can have 40 years of monthly hell. You have to go through that pain almost 500 times.

It is definitely frowned upon to take time off work for it, although 73% of people surveyed by Bloody Good Period, reported in Glamour Magazine said they had struggled at work because of their periods.