Do you fix bones?
I was born to be a doctor.
Because it says?
I watched my grandmother Trinidad heal bones and dislocations.
Healer?
A boy friend of mine, looking for a nest, fell from the tree and sprained his wrist: I saw how my grandmother fixed it.
How did he heal?
Warm water and soap, oils and massages, manipulations… She was also a midwife. In the Filabres mountain range, without electricity or water…
What did your parents do?
My father was a miller and baker in his wood-fired oven, and I helped him bake.
¿Heñir?
Knead the bread dough with both fists.
And his mother?
He has always helped me, he lives there, 91 years old.
What else did you learn in your childhood?
“It is better to have an ugly patch than a beautiful seam,” said my paternal grandmother, Consuelo: from the time I was four years old, she taught me how to darn.
One fixed bones and the other mended.
Do you already understand my medical vocation? Sew and cure! Surgeon and traumatologist.
Now I see it.
I was the first girl to study two specialties at the University of Medicine of Granada, with many trips.
Whose?
Sexist and envious. I didn’t give in. It took me three times as much effort and demonstration as any man… I did it.
Tell me a sexist episode.
“My father never had a woman at his service and I will not make it easy for you to be the first,” the professor of General Surgery, son of the previous professor, told me.
Undisguised machismo.
It was hard, and even more so leaving behind the paradise in which I grew up as a princess among the aroma of bread, and bartering, jumping, grafting trees, planting almond trees, helping each other…
That inner treasure is for life.
It has helped me practice medicine. I have retired from crazy years of seeing forty patients a day. Today, one a day!
Who do you want to help?
To everyone, but especially to women with endometriosis. Because of how much they suffer… among them my daughter, who has suffered from it.
Endometriosis? What is it?
Sees it? Does not know! If it were a male ailment, you would know. But ignorant doctors still tell women who suffer from it phrases like “you’re crazy,” “that disease doesn’t exist,” “women’s things”… Women: never allow it!
Tell me what endometriosis is.
Internal tissue from the uterus migrates to other areas of the body in each menstrual cycle, and creates cysts, lesions… And it hurts!
It hurts much?
Periods don’t have to hurt… But there are women who suffer from disabling pain. They suffer and even faint from their first periods, and half of them start before turning 20.
Intense pain… and more symptoms?
Premenstrual intestinal cramps. Profuse hemorrhagic menses. Gas and ventral bloating. Nausea. Depression. Anxiety. Fatigue. Gluten or lactose intolerance…
Does this happen to many women?
Many. In Catalonia, 150,000 women, and 25% of them have severe symptoms. In Spain, 1,900,000 women. And in the world, 200 million women.
¡Grave!
Gynecologists take too many years to diagnose, due to limited information. It happened to my daughter: she was on the verge of suicide. And… me with her. That is why I have dedicated myself to disseminating everything we know today about endometriosis.
Is it genetic in origin?
Still not known.
Is it known what causes it?
Still not known.
What consequences does it entail?
Intense pain and deterioration of the eggs. I therefore advise freezing eggs.
So that?
To use them on the day the woman wants to conceive a child.
And in the meantime?
Live without menstruating. Because without a period there is no pain or discomfort.
How should the rule be eliminated?
With birth control pills or injectables, hormones that simulate pregnancy or menopause, absence of periods.
What would you explain to the girls about this?
To girls and boys at school, that endometriosis is incapacitating and that the affected woman should not be shamed, but should be supported. And you have to go from one gynecologist to another until you find the one who knows and helps.
If you had a daughter today…
I would do everything! so that she would not suffer what my daughter has suffered from endometriosis. That’s why I’m talking here: so everyone knows.
