Endometriosis: What Dr.'s won't tell you

I am back live this morning, this afternoon, whatever time of day it is for you. If you're not, um, if you don't know who I am, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and empowerment coach. And what we are talking about today is, um, endometriosis, what the doctors won't tell you. So if you happen to be watching on YouTube right now and you like what I'm talking about, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and hit the bell for notifications. So when I go live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon with topics like this, you'll get a notification. Facebook's kind of bad at that, so if you're watching on Facebook, you can go over to YouTube and you can search my first and last name and get those notifications also. Okay, so talking about endometriosis, if you haven't heard my story, aren't familiar with it, Um, I am the infertile mom of 4. Um, what that means is that I was given less than a 1% chance, all my babies, uh, of conceiving. All my babies were born after the age of, um, 35, and, um, naturally, because I couldn't do IVF. Um, I mean, I'm an advocate for, um, getting to the end result that you want, which is a baby, by whatever means necessary. But for me, it wasn't even a choice because I couldn't do, um, an egg retrieval. So what do the doctors not tell you about endometriosis? Well, first of all, let's talk about, um, the pain and symptoms of endometriosis, like what classic endometriosis looks like. So first of all, it takes an average of 10 years for people to get a diagnosis, which is crazy considering 1 in 10 women suffer from this disease. This is not like something, you know, obscure, doesn't affect very many women. It affects quite a few women. And even so, um, you know, practitioners, gynecologists, um, are not really trained or helpful in getting to an infer— or getting to an endometriosis diagnosis. So, um, the symptoms are— can be a lot of different things. But if you have— if you've been on the other side of this, meaning if you have endometriosis, if you've gone through surgeries and the process of cleaning up your endometriosis, and then you get to the other side, you really say to yourself, wow, it would have been helpful if the doctor would have told me this. So if you have debilitating pain, let's talk about the symptoms Can it be other things? If you have debilitating pain during your monthly cycle, can it be other things? It can. It could also be uterine fibroids, but it can be endometriosis, especially if you have— I'm trying not to be too graphic, but especially if you have symptoms associated with bowel and bladder function as well, because sometimes what happens is that endometriosis endometriosis, which is just your, your endometrium lining from your uterus outside of where it's supposed to be. So instead of inside, lining the inside of your uterus, it's somewhere outside of your body. By the way, that can be anywhere in your body. It could be in any muscle, can travel to your shoulder muscle, rarely goes to your lungs and places like that, but it can really go anywhere in your body. Which is why hysterectomy is not a cure for endometriosis. Just, just saying, it's not. So let's go back to the symptoms, especially if you have bowel-related pain during your monthly cycle, especially if you have urinary pain during your monthly cycle. So what's happening with that is that there are adhesions, or the endometrium has attached itself to your ovaries to your bladder or your, your bowel to your uterus or something like that. It's acted like as this sticky glue and glued those things together. And so when you go through your monthly cycle and the hormones to make your endometrium shed and bleed, then you— it's activating that endometriosis and outside of a place where that can functionally happen, right? If your ovary is attached to your bladder by endometriosis tissue, it can't go anywhere. It just bleeds. It's very painful. It makes urination very painful and things like that. So women go— I have an author who suffered also from endometriosis, um, my Infertility Success book collaboration, and She was told everything from she had intercystitis, it was all in her, the pain was all in her head. Keep in mind, she was not able to control her flow at a young age. She was having debilitating pain. She was having terrible pain, you know, with her bowel and urinary, and it took her over 10 years to get a proper diagnosis. So what I'm talking about is normalizing pain from the medical community. If you're having those kind of symptoms, they're gonna tell you, we don't know if it's endometriosis, but we can speculate, you know, as patients that this is what's going on. So what is the, what are we supposed to do? We're having all these terrible symptoms. Nobody will tell us if it's endometriosis or not. Um, we know it's, you know, we've ruled out X, Y, and Z. What people are afraid, and what I was afraid of— I had stage 4 endometriosis, you guys. Stage 4 is really bad. And I was lucky I had a surgery really early in my infertility journey with a surgeon who is very aggressive who was two things. She was very aggressive and she was willing to do the exploratory surgery to see if I had endometriosis and do the excision of the endometriosis while she was in there. So that's what my number one tip is for you is don't be afraid of surgery. I'm not an advocate for, you know, I'm not, I'm not an advocate for to cut is to heal, right? But in this case, don't be afraid of finding out a proper diagnosis through a laparoscopic diagnostic surgery, but advocate for yourself and go ahead and find a very skilled surgeon who, if while they are in there and they see, yes, in fact, we have confirmed that you have endometriosis, that it will, they will go ahead and do the excision surgery and they will get that endometrium tissue out of there and take care of that for you. Okay, so that's really, if you have dramatic pain and dramatic symptoms with endometriosis, surgery is going to be your best bet. If you feel like you might have endometriosis and it's, you know, it's on a scale from 1 to 4 and you feel like your symptoms um, correspond with endometriosis, but you want to make some changes, you can do some diets. Um, diet is both a treatment and a cause because if poor diet can cause endometriosis, bettering your diet can fix endometriosis to a certain degree. Um, for me, mine was so, uh, advanced that it would not have made much of a difference, but I did have the endometriosis removed and then went on, um, to very quickly afterwards make dramatic lifestyle and diet changes so that the endometriosis wouldn't come back. All right, so surgery for diagnosis and then treatment. So we can do surgery for treatment, diet, okay, addressing, um, trauma, Erica Hoke is also something that's very important in treating endometriosis because of some of the things that we talked about last week, right, with frequency, emotions, and things like that. So there's a big correlation between people that have experienced trauma in the form of abuse, sexual abuse, rape, things like that, then suffering from endometriosis because of the trauma in the body and the frequency of the trauma being stored in that way. So toxins also are hormone and endocrine disruptors. And so all of that, all that means is it's making that tissue grow outside of an area where it's supposed to be. It's disrupting your normal bodily function and creating dis-ease in your body. So removing toxins that are hormone and endocrine disruptors I have a whole guide about ditching the toxins in your cupboard in my Infertility Empowered group that you can just go in there and hit the guide section. It's self-led, but it really focuses on all the endocrine and hormone disruptors. I won't go into it here, but there's a lot that you can do that's inside your control. And so the other, the fourth thing contributing to endometriosis is genes. And while there is a lot of research showing that it's hereditary, any of that research does not identify what it is about the hereditary link that is causing the endometriosis. So one of the theories is, is the MTHFR gene, which again, MTHFR is a methylation problem in this, at a cellular level. I'm working on getting a wonderful friend of mine into the group to talk specifically about infertility and MTHFR and why that contributes to the endometriosis. So that's it, guys. That's it in a nutshell. The doctors are not gonna tell you an absolute diagnosis without surgery. So don't be afraid of the surgery. Make the changes. That you need to with your diet and lifestyle and removing toxins. And if you need help with that, that's what we're doing over at Infertility Empowered. So link is in the comments. I hope you have a wonderful Friday afternoon. Health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.