When Jen hurt her shoulder at the gym, she had no idea her life could be in danger...
Pushing myself up off the gym mat, I felt a stabbing pain in my right shoulder blade and the room started to swirl around me.
What’s going on? I fretted.
I’d only done a light workout and was just cooling down.
When the dizziness eased,
I quickly headed home.
‘You should get it checked out at A&E,’ my partner told me.
But I shook my head. Being a Pilates teacher, I was pretty sure it was just a muscle twinge that would soon sort itself out.
Only in the following days, the pain became unbearable.
I also started to feel a tightness in my chest.
My GP sent me for an X-ray.
‘You should get the results
in about a fortnight,’ the radiologist said.
I was just getting into the car when my phone rang.
It was the clinic.
‘Hello?’ I answered.
‘We’ve just reviewed your X-ray, and you appear to
have a collapsed lung,’ a
nurse said. ‘You need to go
to A&E urgently.’
My jaw dropped.
How could I have a collapsed lung and not know?
I was diagnosed with spontaneous pneumothorax –
a random lung collapse.
It could have been life threatening if I’d had breathing difficulties.
Thankfully, my oxygen levels were stable, so I was discharged.
‘Your lung should re-inflate on its own within 10 days,’ the doctor said.
I went for weekly X-rays and, by the fourth, doctors were happy that my lung was inflating.
Then, the day after the scan, I felt the same stabbing shoulder pain.
‘It’s happening again,’
I groaned to my partner.
At hospital, they confirmed I’d had another lung collapse and I was kept in for five days.
I thought that would be the end of it. But a month later,
it happened again.
And even after having major chest surgery, the lung collapses didn’t stop.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ I wept to my consultant.
My life had been put on hold for months.
Determined to find the cause, I started looking at the dates of each collapse.
They were all pretty much
26 days apart.
And then it dawned on me.
Each lung collapse had occurred around my period.
Researching online, I came across a rare condition called thoracic endometriosis.
As the name suggested, it was a type of endometriosis. But instead of endometrial tissue growing in sufferers’ pelvic area, it grew in the
chest cavity.
Symptoms often worsened during a period, as the endometrial tissue shed like the uterine lining.
I was convinced that this was what was causing my
lung collapses.
I had no history of endometriosis, but the symptoms described everything I’d experienced.
While the doctors agreed it was a possibility, they didn’t know much about the condition.
And so, after more lung collapses and scans, I was referred to a specialist.
I underwent surgery to investigate my chest further.
‘We found an endometrial lesion on your diaphragm, which we’ve managed to remove,’ the surgeon told
me after I woke up. ‘It’s likely this was causing your lung
to collapse.’
Sadly, the relief I felt was short-lived.
I suffered from severe pain and sickness afterwards, spending three weeks in hospital recovering.
Months on, I’m still getting lung collapses with every period, so my treatment is ongoing.
But I’m trying to stay positive, and I’m holding a training event for health professionals to increase
their knowledge of
thoracic endometriosis.
It’s my mission to raise awareness.
By Jen Pickering, 40, Liverpool