Again from the Women’s Surgery Group, this time on when diagnostic laparoscopy is indicated:
Diagnostic and operative laparoscopy should be considered in those women with pelvic pain which has not responded after 3 months of nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and/or 3 months of oral contraceptives.
Oh. My. God.
Three months. Even if I’d been trying them consecutively and not together, that should have only been six months.
My first diagnostic lap had been after I’d been trying NSAIDs and oral contraceptives (though mostly NSAIDs at that point) for three years. My second diagnostic lap came ten years after that.
AHAHAHAHA. *sobs.*
So I guess the next time I go to a doctor I know what to ask for. Because, really? I have never had a diagnostic laparoscopy, let alone an operative one, and it’s been … twenty-four years since menarche and onset of symptoms, and fourteen years since I was first able to go to a doctor on my own and pay for it myself. I’ve been on hormonal birth control for at least 7 of those years, and I wish I could have bought stock in Advil, because I use it every month. Less when I’m on HBC than when I’m not, but not a single non-pregnant month without, ever.
Yeah. I’m not sure how widespread these guidelines are (it’s not the AMA or ACOG or anything giving them), but just the fact that there is a group of doctors somewhere comfortable issuing them in terms of a few months, this idea of “waiting it out a few years” (which I was told a lot) seems both ludicrous and unconscionable.