My name is Kate Morris.
I'm 55 years old
and I've worked actively for Verity, running
a local support group for about 20 years
and in the last two years have come on board
as one of the five volunteer trustees that run the charity.
As soon as my period started, I knew from talking to my friends
that this thing was supposed to happen every 28 days,
and I knew straight away that mine didn't.
It seemed to be longer in between
and not as predictable as I'd anticipated.
So I did eventually, when I was able to, approach my GP
who put me on the pill, which regulated the periods,
and that sort of got me through that stage of of my late teens.
But I was curious,
I was curious about my own body.
I wanted to know if it was working properly.
So I came off the pill
and sure enough, everything was completely haywire.
So I went to see my GP at uni
and I stumbled on a lovely fella who said:
“From what I've heard, you should be pleased you don't have periods.”
And I said, “but periods are what makes me a woman.”
So I was referred, I had an internal scan
“Pop your clothes back on and go into the office next door
You've got polycystic ovary syndrome.
I'm really sorry.
You're going to struggle to have children.”
The end.
The following, probably, 20 years
best part of, I worked on the assumption that motherhood
was an unattainable goal for me.
I was still pursuing knowledge.
I wanted to know more.
And I badgered and, you know, nagged
every GP I’d ever met along the line.
And eventually somebody sent me to Birmingham Women's Hospital
and I met a consultant there who was a gynecologist I think.
She changed my life
because she said two key things, she said:
One - “No, no, no.
You could become a mother.
It's just going to be really difficult.
Come back when you want children.”
Right, OK.
Then she gave me a piece of paper that said: there's
a charity out there, they’re called Verity, here’s their address.
And at this point, I began to understand that PCOS
wasn't what I thought it was.
It's a collection of symptoms.
Everybody has a different combination of those symptoms.
Even now, years later, as an expert patient,
I know and completely understand there is no cure for PCOS.
All you can do is manage it.
So for quite a long time, I've managed my symptoms,
but at different times in your life
that is a very different journey.
I'm not that bothered about a bit of chin hair.
I'm not too fussed, if it's a special occasion
or I think people are going to get up close.
I'll deal with it, when I was younger
that was a complete obsession.
Trying to deal with that aspect of how
this condition presents itself was really debilitating.
Weight management has been a continuous theme.
I was relatively slim until I was about 18.
However, when I look back, I don't think it's
particularly normal for a 14, 15 year old schoolgirl to be
eating meal replacement biscuits.
I did that because I could feel
that my body was putting on weight in a way that my friends weren't.
When I went to university, I put on five stone in a year,
and since then my weight management journey has been
lose two stone, put on three
lose two stone, put on three.
Roughly over the subsequent ten years.
I put on a stone a year, but I was on a diet all the time.
As part of my work for Verity,
I run a number of local support groups
and as the years have gone by, what I'm finding increasingly
frustrating is that I am having the same conversation
with young women year after year after year after year.
Having read the parliamentary response to the petition,
I absolutely applaud and I'm grateful on behalf
of all women with PCOS for the significant amount of funding
that has been allocated to research in the field of PCOS.
My observation on that score
is that the focus of that research
and that investment has been on fertility.
Fertility is only one part of a
woman's lifelong journey with PCOS.
Progress has clearly been made there, but the part
of the journey that goes from
teenage diagnosis to failure to conceive...
is ignored.
My belief is that better intervention in that early journey
may well lead to fewer referrals for fertility treatments.
What I would hope this debate can lead to
is some recognition of the importance
of that early journey and that latter journey.