But I think that’s what makes my story compelling — how ordinary it is, how easily it happened to me and could happen to you.
2014 was a great year for me. I turned 24. I started a job I love. I adopted a dog. I moved into a new place. I got married. And all of that was within one summer.
Just a few months after my husband and I said “I do,” 2014 became the year I found out what 13 years of chronic pain and other symptoms signaled. I had an incurable illness.
Endometriosis is a sneaky disease. It arrives at the onset of puberty (for me, age 11) and takes a chokehold of your entire body. Unknown to my teenage self, cells that my body should have been shedding regularly through menstruation were abnormally implanting outside of my uterus, causing lesions, adhesions, scarring and, most obviously, excruciating pain and excessive bleeding.
But from age 11 until 24, doctor after doctor wrote off my fainting episodes, writhing pain that gave me cold sweats and spasms, and the overall necessity to schedule my life around a normal bodily function as “all in my head.” I later found out that response was par for the course for women with my disease.
When I left for college, I knew that I couldn’t get a degree and live like this at the same time. So they offered me the only medication that could somewhat manage my severe pelvic pain: birth control.
The first time I filled it, I walked to the Walgreen’s down the street from my dorm. Up until then, my mom had managed any medications I needed, so I had never been financially responsible for my own care. I didn’t think much of it. My parents had never commented on how much prescriptions cost.
The pharmacist rang up my bill. “$62.”
My stomach lurched. $62 on what income? The savings I’d accumulated for emergencies?
On average, my prescription birth control to manage my crippling pain cost anywhere from $60 to $90. For a college student who earned a small wage through two campus jobs, it was devastating.
Prior to my endometriosis diagnosis, my interactions with the health care system were fairly limited. I wasn’t privy to the costs of caring for my mom’s cancer when I was in middle school or when she was diagnosed again the summer of my sophomore year of college. I didn’t know what “insurance premiums,” “co-pays” or “deductibles” were.