A Labour MP has spoken out about the excruciating pain caused by a ruptured cyst on her ovary which caused an infection in a bid to break the taboo surrounding periods.
Louise Haigh was speaking in a debate about a law to stop workplaces discriminating against women with heavy periods and particularly endometriosis.
Like one in five women, the shadow policing minister has Polycystic Ovaries Syndrome – a health condition caused by small growths on a woman’s ovaries.
She told a debate in Westminster Hall about endometriosis and other conditions: “Last year during a round of crucial Brexit votes I collapsed in the opposition whips office and was taken to A&E over the road.
“I ended up staying in St Thomas’ for almost a week, hooked up to an IV and pumped with antibiotics and painkillers before I was eventually told that a cyst on one of my ovaries had ruptured and that the fluid inside it was causing pain as it settled in places it shouldn’t and had caused an infection.
“Last week, once again in the middle of a round of Brexit votes, I was back in A&E with exactly the same problem and in excruciating pain.”
MPs are discussing passing a law passed to prevent any employer from discriminating against a woman in the workplace if she suffers from heavy or painful periods or needs time off for a gynecological reason.
Ms Haigh referenced a new book by journalist Emma Barnett called It’s About Bloody Time. Period in which she reveals that roughly the same number of people suffer from endometriosis as do Type 1 Diabetes and yet 35 times as much money goes into researching the latter than the disease only suffered by women.
She said that many of the difficulties with diagnosing and treating PCOS and endometriosis are because they are conditions that just affect women.
She told MPs: “We don’t talk about our periods because they’re somehow shameful, unhygienic, unclean, that they should be kept secret and private.
“Tropes that have been used to subjugate and silence women for centuries – barring some women from entering their place of worship when they are bleeding and in some parts of the world preventing girls from attending school whilst on their period.”
Tory MP Alec Shelbrooke, who brought the debate, quoted from a number of women who had told of their difficulties getting diagnosed and treated.
He said that what a lot of those women had in common was that they were “told by doctors that it was all part of being a woman.”
He spoke about the difficulties faced by women at work. and wanted to expose the myths that women with the condition were “lazy, unreliable, dishonest and a nonsense”.
