Tegan Mitchell waited six years for pain diagnosis
While doctors dismissed her agony for years, 22-year-old Teagan Mitchell has turned her chronic pain battle into a mission helping other women find their voice.
Armstrong Creek woman Teagan Mitchell has spent much of her life living with crippling pain.
The 22-year-old lives with endometriosis and says the pain “doesn’t go away”.
“The biggest thing in my experience was getting someone to listen to me being in pain,” she said.
“The impact is very hard to measure when it’s your every day life because it’s really hard for me to know what my life was like before I got this diagnosis.”
Ms Mitchell said it was time to change the way women were treated by health professionals, and welcomed the recent Inquiry into Women’s Pain report, released rearlier this month, which highlighted what many women, including herself, have long felt - that women experience both chronic pain and pain dismissal at disproportionate rates.
“It’s the dehumanisation of ‘you’re in pain and we can’t do anything to help you’ that really makes it difficult,” Ms Mitchell said.
“Women are suffering everyday and they’re not necessarily getting help for that.”
Ms Mitchell was one of 13,000 women who made a submission to last year’s inquiry due to the chronic pain she experiences from endometriosis, which she said often goes undiagnosed.
“I waited six years to get an answer to my pain,” she said.
Endometriosis Australia describes the condition as occurring when tissue similar to that of the uterine lining grows outside of the uterus, causing pain and potential infertility, and affecting one in seven females across the country.
Ms Mitchell is the liaison officer at Women with Disabilities Victoria’s Barwon Hub, which connects and supports women with disabilities in the Geelong region, including those with chronic pain.
She said her own experience with pain led her to working in the sector.
Women’s Health and Wellbeing Barwon South West chief executive officer Jodie Hill said the
inquiry has revealed the “systemic” extent of women’s pain.
The report revealed that an overwhelming 90 per cent of the women and girls who responded to the inquiry experienced pain lasting longer than a year, and 71 per cent felt it was dismissed by healthcare professionals.
The Allan Government has begun rolling out solutions based on the findings and recommendations in the report, which found a gender pain gap.
These include the green whistle for pain relief during IUD insertion, a statewide healthcare standard when treating women’s pain, and a specialised clinic in the Royal Children’s Hospital, set to open next year.
Ms Hill said that her organisation, which works to promote health and advance gender equality in the region, will be able to contribute to implementing the report’s recommendations on a local scale to address women’s pain.
“Pain is not something that women should just be forced to live with,” she said.
“It is something that can be managed and prevented, and should be, and so if the community starts to think differently about that it will ease women’s way forward in terms of better managing and accessing services.”
The report revealed that various marginalised groups face additional barriers to accessing healthcare, a gap which Belmont’s Women With Disabilities Victoria aims to address.
Originally published as Tegan Mitchell waited six years for pain diagnosis
