"But then you are very small..."

(Tell me about it.... www.quickmeme.com)

So, things have been happening and as we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks I’ve been too busy ranting about wider issues to really give much thought to me personally.

The short version of my recent problems is that I started to have gynaecology related symptoms again. I have had these flare up before but because I was referred straight from gastroenterology through to gynaecology, the gynaecologist took umbrage at my apparently being “palmed off” on him and refused to offer anything other than “it’s just your bowel”.

As I’m sure other chronic pain patients will recognise things have to usually get a lot worse than normal before I’ll do anything about them. You become accustomed to a certain level of “background” pain over time, so there has to be a fairly sharp spike for a prolonged period before I’ll succumb to seeing the doctor – not a prospect I look forward to. Numerous experiences with disinterested or unhelpful doctors mean I tend to go into appointments somewhat spoiling for a fight.

This time however the doctor was helpful and thorough, so off I went to have ultrasound scans to rule in or out a host of various potential nasties. If you want to find out more about chronic gynaecology issues such as endometriosisand polycystic ovarian syndrome I suggest following the highlighted links to some informative pages.

This sounds relatively straight forward until you factor in the fact me and internal examinations of any kind are not on the best of terms. Even the kind that nurses always say “It might be a little uncomfortable but it won’t hurt” do in fact hurt and generally leave me able to do little else for the day in question. Thinking about it that in itself was probably something of a clue to the problem.

Two ultrasounds later and nothing of concern was to be found. I tend to be a little ambivalent in the face of results like this because on the one hand it’s nice to know what you haven’t got, but at the same time nobody likes being thrown back into the jaws of the assumption that there’s absolutely nothing wrong – you can be fairly sure if something hurts rather a lot then there’s a problem somewhere.

 As I was doing my best (and generally poor) impression of normal walking whilst severely uncomfortable away from the couch, the nurse said “I honestly think it’s because you’re so small.”

(And we all know how well that goes for me... pinterest.com)

Um, what?

Now being the towering height of only 5’3” I’ve heard most of the jokes known to humankind about short people, but this was most certainly a new one.

The nurse proceeded to explain that it’s fairly evident from my build and from the scans themselves that my pelvis is very narrow. When you look at me head on you also notice that the vast majority of my diminutive height is in my disproportionately long legs. This means that my torso is very short and all of this amounts to me having a very small abdominal and pelvic region. There’s not a lot of room in there.

The nurse talked through my history and whilst not making a definitive pronouncement said that she felt the symptoms were likely to be my bowel playing up and this pain radiating outward due to the lack of space.

Whilst it’s nice to hear a well thought out explanation of what your body is doing, it’s a little infuriating to hear that this means, short of putting me on a rack, there’s little to be done about the problem. We are most assuredly back to heat, painkillers and Pilates in terms of options, because despite the gluten free diet improving things the problem is still far from gone and a proper solution is looking less and less likely as time goes on.

On an amusing note though, it would appear evolution has somehow managed to create a human too small to be a human properly.  

Darwin, you’re a first class git.

Has anybody else come up against dead ends which can’t be helped? What do you do in this case?

Seeking out some Skele-gro and wishing you all many spoons xxx