I had painful periods from the time I was sixteen. For years, every doctor told me the same thing: period pain is normal. It wasn't. At twenty-seven I figured out on my own that I had endometriosis, but it took years more to be believed.
The turning point came in Edinburgh, when an endometrioma ruptured on my ovary. I spent two weeks in the hospital with sepsis and a 104-degree fever before anyone would operate. I left weighing 96 pounds, grateful to be alive and afraid it would happen again.
Six months later I had excision surgery with a specialist in Atlanta, the gold standard for endometriosis. I was nearly pain-free for five years. When the pain started to come back, my husband Matt, a bioengineer, went to work on a formula. That formula became Semaine.
I am not an unusual case. One in ten women have endometriosis, and most spend years being told their pain is normal. That is the whole reason Semaine exists: so women are believed, and so their health is taken seriously.
