A woman has told of the excruciating and debilitating pain she endured while stuck on a gynaecology waiting list for three and a half years as she urged the government to slash waiting times. Michelle Heffer told The Independent she first started seeing her GP for very heavy periods as a teenager before being diagnosed with two cysts on her ovaries caused by endometriosis after having her first ultrasound in 2020. Ms Heffer, an actor who lives in Essex, said the pain she was experiencing forced her to stop working her side job as a teaching assistant as well as turning down TV work.
“Sometimes it was a really sharp stabbing pain ,” she added. “I used to say to friends ‘I just want to rip my insides out’.” Her comments come as a new report, by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), has found gynaecology waiting lists in England have grown more quickly than any other elective specialty and are now over twice the size they were before the Covid crisis.
The research discovered three quarters of a million women in the UK are currently waiting for gynaecology hospital care – with more patients referred than are seen and treated every month meaning that the list is growing. “While I was waiting, it just dominated my life for those three and a half years, because I was in pain so often,” Ms Heffer said. “It was not just during my periods that I was in pain.
” Ms Heffer explained she was forced to wait over a year for surgery which involved .