A lack of education about PCOS also leads to shame around symptoms like weight gain and excess body hair. At first, I didn’t realise my body was reacting to my PCOS, and I felt ashamed and uncomfortable in my own skin. Florence also said she thought both acne and “hair that shouldn’t be in certain places” were just “part of being a woman”. Alas, it’s not necessarily – medical misogyny just prevents conditions like this from achieving the awareness it deserves, for those who have PCOS or know and love someone who does.
In the few years since I’ve started to look closer at my own PCOS experience, I’ve discovered that it has the ability to impact so many elements of my life. My sleep, my gut health, how I react to different exercise regimes such as strength training and cardio, even my sex life. It feels like there’s nothing the condition cannot touch, holding court over my body.
Florence also spoke about the lifestyle changes that are required to manage your PCOS appropriately. “You realise you have to change your lifestyle, you have to be proactive and think ahead into the future,” she said. “I think [for] lots of young women, that’s not really necessarily what you’re thinking of doing when you’re in your 20s.” But if we had better education and research around the condition, we might feel more free to make these decisions around our bodies, in a timely fashion.
When it comes to my fertility, I have absolutely no idea if my PCOS would affect my ability to have children. But it seems likely, seeing as and 70% of women with PCOS have fertility problems. And while many women, including Florence, are opting to freeze their eggs as a way of increasing the odds of conceiving, not all of us can afford to. The uncertainty and lack of clarity around PCOS and each individual woman’s fertility is a constant source of anxiety.
So much of the misogyny, misinformation and dismissal of PCOS and other gynaecological conditions could begin to be combatted with education, in schools and beyond – so that those who are suffer from them feel less invisible, stigmatised, ashamed. “It wouldn’t be that hard to educate everybody on this when you’re at school,” Florence said in her interview. “It’s something that will be the defining factor of whether you can have children or not.”
She’s absolutely right, education around the far-reaching impact of PCOS defines so much for us – not just when it comes to motherhood, but our entire relationship with our bodies. Women around the world, including the three million of us in the UK, deserve more.
