My doctor told me I was constipated – but the truth was far more serious

Last year, I woke up and felt a lump around my belly button.

At first, I rationalised it. I thought I had slept on my remote control and used frozen vegetables as an ice pack. While the lump felt relatively tough, it did not hurt. I pressed it, watched it, waited for it to go.

It didn’t.

I live with Scoliosis, so I’m used to my body not feeling straightforward. Guessing it might be a digestive issue or a shift in my spine, I booked a GP appointment.

The doctor pressed my stomach briefly, announced it was probably constipation and prescribed a laxative.

I left the surgery feeling flat. Not reassured, just reduced. I had a hunch there could be something more to this – but you trust your GP, so I followed the doctor’s plan exactly. Medication, water, more fibre. But my body didn’t respond. The lump stayed.

I was still working and moving through life as usual, but the sense I was carrying something that wasn’t being seen stayed with me. I remember feeling bloated and there was a lot of pressure around my belly button, like a hard mass.

The lump felt big and I could even see it through my clothes. When I would get more stressed and worried, it would cramp; even bending down to pick something up would be painful. Often, I’d just have to sit and wait for the pain to pass.

I really hoped it wasn’t anything sinister, but I couldn’t help but worry.

After a couple of weeks I stopped the medication and booked an appointment with another GP, asking for a second opinion.

That second appointment changed everything.

Before I fully explained, this new GP spotted the lump. Even from the end of the bed I was sitting on, the bulge was visible; I could now cup it with the palm of my hand.

She examined me with more precision, and said, ‘This could be fibroids’ – non-cancerous growths of tissue. 

Hearing the word transported me back to 2017, when I was having an ultrasound for my Scoliosis and the doctor had off-handedly mentioned I had a small fibroid on my uterus. She didn’t give any more details and assured me it wasn’t anything to worry about as it was ‘so small’.

As it turned out, that doctor had been wrong.

Now, although her tone was casual, this GP told me I urgently needed to go to hospital for further scans – and I began to cry. Not just out of fear of the unknown, but from relief that this lump finally had a potential name.

What stays with me most is how often Black women are expected to prove their pain before it is fully explored

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After that, everything became about waiting. I had blood tests, stool tests, appointments managed through an app that had to be checked constantly. 

During the two to three months between that GP appointment and being seen for an ultrasound, I looked for understanding about the condition anywhere I could find it.

My mother sent me clips of women speaking about fibroids online. I found spaces where Black women were sharing their experiences openly, patterns that felt familiar. 

I learned that a lot of people with fibroids – Black women in particular – were of a similar age to me (20s, 30s) and did not feel seen or heard by most medical professionals. They felt many GPs in the UK and US collectively did not have enough information on fibroids to know how to diagnose or treat them; meaning they could grow so big, many require surgery.

I was still scared – but hearing these stories of shared experiences helped ground me, while everything else felt out of my control.

I was referred for a full 40-minute abdominal scan. My mother came with me, and the room was quiet except for the machine moving across my stomach, hips and abdomen.

Afterwards, I was told there were multiple fibroids, one around 7cm – but that I’d need to wait for an official diagnosis.

It was a few weeks later that I received a call from the hospital. My mother was in the kitchen, so I put it on speaker. When I heard the doctor confirm my fibroids diagnosis, I cried again.

They told me I had multiple large fibroids on my uterus.

They explained that they usually cause heavier and more painful periods – something I’d often experienced, and now I knew why.  

I realised that my bleeding had become even heavier when the lump appeared, and with all the bloating, it became clear how much my fibroids had multiplied since the ‘small’ one the doctor spotted in 2017.

I felt so frustrated.

The doctor on the phone told me that, while many women can get pregnant with fibroids, they can cause complications in pregnancy, especially when they are large. Mine are outside my uterus, which was a slight relief – but the fact there are so many large fibroids around my abdomen still made it a scary concept to grasp.

Especially when, just months earlier, I’d been told it was constipation.

Now I have ongoing gynaecology appointments and monitoring to check if the fibroids get bigger, and to see if any treatment may be needed, like injections to lower oestrogen levels (it’s thought that oestrogen may encourage the growth of uterine fibroids) or potential processes to shrink them and stop heavy bleeding.

I often have to wait months to be seen, and I’m currently waiting for my next appointment to get more clarity on the best way forward.

It’s a frustrating waiting game, but what stays with me most is how often Black women are expected to prove their pain before it is fully explored.

I discovered that we are up to three times more likely to develop fibroids, yet it still wasn’t treated as a consideration when I first walked into my GP surgery.

I often think about how symptoms are read differently depending on skin tone, and how easily things can be missed when assumptions are made too quickly.

If I hadn’t pushed for a second opinion, I might still be taking medication for constipation while, in fact, something else entirely was happening.

Now I trust myself differently. I’ve learned what it feels like when something is being missed. I listen to my gut, literally.

And I carry hope that sharing my story might make it easier for someone else to be believed – the first time around.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]. 

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