Noelle Menu, 37, says the pain began to darken her reality at a pivotal moment in her life — once she and her husband decided to try for kids, when she was 26.
She stopped taking her birth control, which she had been on for a long period, and said she began experiencing pain she’d never had before.
The pain came to define and limit her life, she said, and it seemed nothing could relieve it. She suffered through delays in diagnosis, as well as emergency room visits, a hysterectomy and being placed on waitlists stretching years to see specialists and receive treatment. At that point, it was “literally destroying my life,” she said, “and to hear it’s about three to four years to see somebody here, I was just so emotional, so devastated.”
Soon, she realized: “We can’t deal with it in Canada.”
So Menu and her husband pulled from their savings and went into debt to seek private treatment at EndoGlobal in Tijuana, Mexico, which cost about $35,000 including airfare, a multi-day hotel stay and other costs.
