the Healthcare Professional Becomes the Patient: What Endometriosis Taught Me
Women are remarkably good at coping. Sometimes, perhaps, too good. We adjust. We work around things. We turn up to work, look after our families, keep appointments and carry on with our lives, often while dealing with something nobody else can see.
Eventually, something interesting can happen: we stop asking whether what we have learnt to cope with is something we should be coping with at all.
Functioning isn’t the same as being well
I understand this from both sides of healthcare. I am a pharmacist, but I am also a woman living with endometriosis.
My own experience began at 19, when I started living with significant pain. There are parts of that experience I choose to keep private, and this is the first time I have spoken about it publicly in this way. What I do want to share is what it taught me, because living with a chronic condition changed my understanding of healthcare in a way that professional training alone never could.
When coping becomes normal
As healthcare professionals, we are trained to listen, assess symptoms and make evidence based decisions. Those principles are fundamental to good care. But becoming the patient taught me something that is harder to learn from a textbook: what it feels like when there isn’t an immediate answer.
When something persists for long enough, you adapt. You change your expectations and routines. Things that once would have concerned you can gradually become part of everyday life.
That ability to adapt is valuable, but it can also disguise just how much something is affecting you.
Endometriosis is a particularly striking example. The World Health Organisation estimates that it affects around 10% of reproductive-age women globally and recognises its potential impact on physical and mental health, work, relationships, and quality of life.1
In the UK, Endometriosis UK reported in 2026 that the average time from first seeking medical help to diagnosis had reached nine years and four months. Thirty-nine per cent of respondents said they had visited their GP ten or more times before endometriosis was suspected.2
Those figures make me wonder: how much can be missed when somebody has become very good at living with something that isn’t normal for them?
What being a patient taught me as a pharmacist
My pharmacy training gave me clinical knowledge. Living with endometriosis gave that knowledge context.
It has made me particularly conscious of listening when someone tells me that something doesn’t feel right, rather than judging the significance of a problem by how well they appear to be functioning.
I remember one woman who came to speak to me in the pharmacy about symptoms she had been experiencing. As she explained what was happening, I felt it was important that she didn’t simply accept it as something she had to put up with. I encouraged her to speak to her doctor and seek further investigation.
Some time later, completely by chance, I saw her while I was out in town. She recognised me and stopped to tell me that she had taken my advice. Further investigations had identified a fibroid, which had subsequently been treated.
What I remember most clearly is what she said to me: “You really helped me.”
I hadn’t diagnosed her, that wasn’t my role. I had listened, recognised that what she was describing warranted further investigation and encouraged her to seek appropriate medical care.
I have never forgotten that encounter.
It reinforced something my own experience had already begun to teach me: don’t measure whether something matters by how well somebody has learnt to live with it.
What have we quietly learnt to live with?
This doesn’t mean every symptom indicates an underlying condition, nor that we should attempt to diagnose ourselves. But there is value in knowing what is normal for us and noticing when something changes.
Perhaps a more useful question than “Can I cope with this?” is “How much have I changed my life in order to cope with this?”
Is something recurring or worsening? Have you quietly adjusted your routine around it? Is it affecting your work, relationships or everyday life? Have you spoken to an appropriate healthcare professional about it?
Being able to carry on doesn’t automatically mean something isn’t affecting you.
And seeking advice isn’t about arriving with your own diagnosis. Sometimes it begins simply with saying: something has changed, and I would like to understand why.
From lived experience to something bigger
These experiences eventually influenced the direction I wanted my professional life to take.
When my son was around 18 months old, I wasn’t working and had begun thinking seriously about what I wanted to do next. I knew I wanted to contribute something meaningful to women’s health, but I was also thinking about a much more everyday problem: how complicated looking after ourselves can become.
Even before motherhood, I wasn’t always consistent with supplements. Life gets busy, routines slip and navigating numerous ingredients, products and bottles can quickly become another task.
I kept coming back to a simple question: could this be made easier?
That question eventually led me to create EndOvia and its first product, TriBalance: a considered daily supplement developed with convenience in mind.
I don’t believe a supplement is a treatment for endometriosis, nor should supplementation replace appropriate medical care. What I wanted to build was informed by a broader principle: women deserve health information and support that is responsible, understandable and easier to navigate.
Living with endometriosis has influenced the pharmacist I became, the way I listen to women and, eventually, the company I chose to build.
But if there is one thing I hope another woman takes from my experience, it isn’t about endometriosis or supplements.
It is this:
Don’t become so good at coping that you stop questioning what you’re coping with.
Pay attention to changes. Ask questions. Seek appropriate advice when something doesn’t feel right or is affecting your life.
Healthcare won’t always provide an immediate answer. Bodies are complex and medicine rarely works that neatly.
But you don’t need to have the answer before you deserve to be heard.
Words by Sabah Azhar Mian for The Well Edit.
REFERENCES
1. World Health Organization. Endometriosis. WHO Endometriosis fact sheet
2. Endometriosis UK. Endometriosis UK release new report highlighting alarming increase in endometriosis diagnosis times. 2026.
Endometriosis UK 2026 report.
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