In the UK, nearly 10,000 women are diagnosed with uterine cancer each year. Also known as womb cancer, it’s the fourth most common cancer for women.
While heavy and painful periods are a common occurence for many women, they could also be the first sign of uterine cancer.
The major symptoms of uterine cancer are unusual vaginal bleeding, spotting or discharge.
For pre-menopausal women this includes menorrhagia which is abnormally heavy bleeding or prolonged bleeding.
Other signs can be difficulty or pain when urinating, pain during sex and pain in the pelvic area.
For 24-year-old Lydia Brain, her first sign that something wasn’t quite right was her abnormally heavy periods. She hadn’t thought anything of them until she was on a plane when her period came on all of a sudden.
It was so immediate and the rush of blood so large that she thought she may have suffered a miscarriage. This led her to the doctor.
She told Cosmpolitan: “Because I was young, I got the feeling they thought there wasn’t much reason to worry too extensively about my gynaecological health, and instead they put my heavy bleed down to stress.
“I told them I hadn’t been stressed. Now I was stressed, because I wanted answers and I wasn’t getting them.”
Weeks later and her periods had become unmanageably heavy – so much so that she had to set alarms during the night to change her sanitary wear. Lydia couldn’t exercise and her periods were taking over her life.
She became severely anaemic from the loss of blood and her doctor found two fibroids that needed removing. Eight months later, during the surgery her doctor found that Lydia actually had an extremely rare form of uterine cancer.
