NHS worker 'consumed' by pain so crippling she could no longer paint on 'happy face'

dailyrecord.co.uk:

An NHS worker says her life has been turned around after living through years of pain and anxiety.Karen Parker, a volunteer manager at NHS Ayrshire & Arran, of Ayr, spoke to the health board about her experience on Monday.She told them how she had been in chronic pain for as long as she could remember and had approached life by "putting on a ‘happy face’ and getting on with it".Karen, who is originally from Irvine, had first been diagnosed with endometriosis and fibroids when she was 19, following five years of ‘crippling’ period pain which, she said, often lasted an entire month.She said: “It was a relief to know there was a clinical reason for my experiences.

Whilst it didn’t give me a cure, I was able to rest in the knowledge that it ‘wasn’t all in my mind’."However, when she was 25, Karen was hit by the devastating news that she suffered infertility.The only positive was the realisation that the fertility treatment helped the chronic pain.That would not last, she said: “It wasn’t until I was around 33 years old that the pain was back again – and worse than ever before.”From there she searched for as many alternative therapies ‘as humanly possible’, but was forced to resort to over the counter pain relief as there were days she simply couldn’t function because of the pain.She continued: “But the pain only got worse, along with the increasingly long list of symptoms such as continual bleeding, headaches from anxiety and stress, and further down the line, a diagnosis of depression. “Painting on the ‘happy face’ was no longer something I had the strength to do.

I guess you could say, I felt like the condition had ‘consumed’ me.” Then, in 2020, her condition took a turn for the worse, with increased symptoms and a change