You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

So back when Kate Lawrenceon was a PhD student, she was enrolling patients for a study and

met someone who changed her life.

This patient was a woman in her early 30s and was in a lot of pelvic pain.

The patient didn't know why the pain was happening, but wanted a hysterectomy to remove

their uterus altogether.

She was having almost like menopausal symptoms, lots of sweating and just lots of, I'd say,

hormonal disruptions.

And I was just so struck by the fact that this person wasn't going to have the opportunity

to have a family if that's what they had wanted.

And it turned out the patient had endometriosis, a disorder Kate had never heard of before.

Endometriosis is when endometrial tissue, the tissue that makes up the inner lining

of the uterus grows outside the uterus on the ovaries or the fallopian tubes.

Or perhaps on the bowel or the bladder, but it can even be found at more distant locations.

And so we get people coming to our medical center who are having surgery for endometriosis

in the lungs.

And when the cells grow where they're not supposed to, there's no way for them to exit

the body as menstrual blood.

The cells become trapped, creating lesions.

Doctors and researchers group endometriosis into four different stages, minimal mild, moderate

and severe.

But these stages only describe the lesion size and location.

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