It was inexplicable pain at the top of her leg that pushed Yasmin Gharbi* to seek medical help – something that, eight months of appointments and referrals later, would show a cyst on her left fallopian tube. That wasn’t the only thing she found out during her scan.
“Do you know that you’ve got polycystic ovarian syndrome [PCOS, in May renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome or PMOS]? You’ve got all these follicles on your ovaries. Have you ever been told that before?” the doctors quizzed. She hadn’t, making their abrupt diagnosis “a bit of a shock”, Gharbi, 32, says. When she went back to her GP, she was told that she needed to see a gynaecologist – for which the waitlist was a year.
The civil servant battled on, trying to get help for her symptoms including insulin resistance (which leads to weight gain) and irregular periods. But repeatedly being on the receiving end of “NHS failings, not being listened to and not even being able to get treatment” led Gharbi to give up on the health service completely. Instead, she decided to go back and forth to her native Belgium for treatment – something that, as she is a UK taxpayer, has resulted in costs of an estimated £5,000 across things like consultations and surgery over the past five years.
