Kelowna resident Brittany Lynn Pope with her little girl.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Brittany Lynn Pope

A Kelowna woman with a painful condition took extreme measures to end her suffering last year, when she flew across the Atlantic ocean for surgery.

Brittany Lynn Pope has struggled on and off with endometriosis, a condition where tissue normally found inside the uterus grows in other parts of the body. It can cause pelvic pain, more painful menstrual cycles and sometimes painful adhesions or scar tissue that attaches to internal parts.

“I know for most people it causes painful periods,” she said. “For me it was searing, burning pain in my side all day that got so bad I had to take a leave from work and couldn’t properly care for my daughter.”

After undergoing a series of medical tests and scans, she was repeatedly told there was nothing wrong with her and was dismissed. While endometriosis is one of the most common gynecological diseases and affects around 10% of women at reproductive age, she is not alone in experiencing obstacles and delays in getting a diagnosis.

READ MORE: Kelowna woman trying to ensure seniors in care are treated better than her mother was

Eventually, Pope got fed up and took her health matters into her own hands.

“I started looking online and joined The Endometriosis Network Canada where I saw people going to other countries for surgeries,” she said. “I sent my MRI to three different surgeons in France, the states and Romania and did video calls with all of them. Romania was the cheapest option.”

In January 2021, Pope went to a private hospital in Romania. A letter from her Romanian doctor and a negative COVID test were required. The trip and the surgery cost her $10,000.

“I was escorted down an elevator to an operating room at the Bucharest Endometriosis Centre to have excision surgery by Dr. Gabriel Mitroi,” she said. “There was an English speaking coordinator there to help me. It was an intense surgery where multiple organs had to be separated from each other because they were glued together by adhesions caused by my condition.”

Kelowna woman Brittany Lynn Pope at the Bucharest Endometriosis Centre following surgery for endometriosis.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Brittany Lynn Pope

Pope said it took a month of recovery before she was back up and doing normal activities and a full year of healing to reach an almost completely pain free life.

READ MORE: West Kelowna woman with cystic fibrosis receives a miracle

Raluca Susanu is a spokesperson for Dr. Gabriel at the Bucharest Endometriosis Centre.

“We receive quite a lot of patients from Canada,” Susanu said in an email to iNFOnews. “We have at least one patient a month from Canada and sometimes even four or five patients in a month.”

Susanu said the hospital receives a lot of cases like Pope’s.

“They are in a lot of pain, they have been for years, and no one can diagnose them," she said. "We try to inform patients that scans are not relevant, and CTs are useful only when searching for thoracic endometriosis. The MRI, if it’s properly done, can confirm a diagnosis, especially in the pelvic area. And sometimes, not even the MRI can accurately predict what we will find once we start the surgery.”

Susanu said most of the MRI’s the hospital receives from patients are not well done or they are not relevant for endometriosis, and that doing MRI’s requires experience and skill. Multidisciplinary care is important in diagnosing and treating endometriosis.

READ MORE: Patient says more transparency needed after Kamloops hospital department closures

Susanu said diagnosing endometriosis is not hard for a specialist but can be very difficult for someone who is not familiar with the disease. Delays in diagnosis are due to a lack of knowledge about the disease, which results in patients going from specialist to specialist with no one identifying the cause of the symptoms.

“The symptoms of endometriosis are very diverse, and they depend on the localization of the disease,” Susanu said. “Endometriosis has been found on almost every organ in the body. The most common symptom is pelvic pain. But other symptoms like bowel problems, pain in the back, pain in the shoulder, difficulty breathing, pain with urination, fatigue, these are considered non-specific symptoms and they are rarely attributed to endometriosis.”

An endometriosis specialist knows that this disease can have atypical clinical manifestations, and they will put the symptoms together like a puzzle. Susanu said only one medical specialist is needed for a diagnosis, a gynecologist who recognizes the disease.

“Endometriosis can be diagnosed after a physical examination, after finding out the full medical history of the patient,” Susanu said. “The most relevant test that can help with a diagnosis and with preparing the surgery is an MRI, with or without endometriosis protocol. The problem is that it also needs to be done by a radiologist who is familiarized with the disease.”

The lesions can usually be diagnosed through laparoscopy, where a women’s pelvic organs are checked with a thin lighted tube that has a video camera. 

The Bucharest Endometriosis Centre.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/ Brittany Lynn Pope

Diagnosing is one thing, but operating on the disease is a different matter.

“Endometriosis presents in different textures and different colours so the surgeon needs to be familiar with its appearance in order to identify all the lesions,” Susanu said. “If the lesions are not all excised, then the symptoms might persist. For cases with multiple organ involvement, it is necessary to have a multidisciplinary team. This way, all the lesions will be removed in one surgery, so the patient doesn’t have to undergo multiple surgeries for the same thing.”

B.C. Ministry of Health communications manager Krystal Thomson said in an emailed statement to iNFOnews that gynecologists who are experienced in working with endometriosis may be able to offer a preliminary diagnosis of endometriosis based on symptoms, pain mapping exams, and/or ultrasound finding.

“However, the only way to definitively diagnose endometriosis is through a surgical procedure called a laparoscopy," Thomson said.

The Centre for Pelvic Pain and Endometriosis at B.C. Women’s Hospital is a cutting edge interdisciplinary program for endometriosis and pain treatment that serves patients throughout the province, she said.

Getting to the hospital requires a referral from a primary care provider. Once a referral is accepted, the patient has an assessment by a gynaecologist at the women’s hospital who specializes in chronic pelvic pain to create a treatment plan. 

“B.C. Women’s hospital also has an active educational program to teach our residents and colleagues about endometriosis,” Thomson wrote. “They have a fellowship program to teach specialized laparoscopic surgical skills for endometriosis excision. Through B.C. Women’s and the Provincial Health Services Authority we are endeavouring to raise awareness and equip them with better tools but there is still work to do.”

Laparoscopies, like all surgical procedures, are classified as non-urgent, urgent or emergent by the respective health-care professional, and Thompson said health-care professionals are the best ones to make this decision.

Due to hospital capacity strains from COVID-19, non-urgent scheduled surgeries have been postponed. This allows for emergent and urgent surgeries to continue. When health-care capacity allows for non-urgent surgeries to resume, those previously postponed are prioritized.

In Pope’s case, she said it took too long to get a referral to the B.C. Women’s Hospital and then to get her initial consultation there.

“The week I was leaving to Romania the B.C. Women’s hospital called me and said I was half-way through a wait for consultation,” she said. “It had already been over seven months. I was in so much pain I couldn’t sit by then.”

To contact a reporter for this story, email Shannon Ainslie or call 250-819-6089 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. 

News from © iNFOnews, 2022