Young Ghanaian lady, Elizabeth Amoaa who was born with two vaginas, two wombs and two cervixes has spoken out about her extremely rare condition.
Elizabeth Amoaa , 35 said she was diagnosed with uterus didelphys in 2015 after spending years in pain without knowing what was actually wrong with her.
From the age of 10, she visited the hospital on many occasions and complained of devastating abdominal pain but doctors had repeatedly dismissed her condition.
Elizabeth, whose vagina is Y-shaped with two vaginal canals which lead to two cervixes and two wombs, only got answers to her problem at age 31.
From that moment, she underwent a total of six surgeries in the space of three years and also suffered a miscarriage which nearly killed her.
Elizabeth Amoaa told Mirror Online in an interview sighted by Kasatintin.com that:
‘My periods were always very heavy. I used to complain a lot about abdomen pain but when my mother took me to the hospital doctors just kept giving me iron supplements and multivitamins and just said I was anaemic or had a yeast infection.
‘So I just believed that and continued taking my supplements’.
In 2003, Elizabeth was diagnosed with fibroids in the UK and doctors informed her that it will be difficult for her to conceive a child. She was 19-years-old then.
‘I was really shocked but at the same time I just dismissed it as I wasn’t ready to marry let alone have a baby. At the time, I was still at university so I didn’t take it seriously. I just wanted to focus on my career’, she said.
According to Elizabeth Amoaa, during this period, her menses pain got increasingly worse. She passed out countless times while out shopping and experienced regular nose bleeds. Sex was also extremely painful for her.
She revealed that ‘Ever since I started being sexually active around 18, I always thought the pain was just psychological. That it was just me.
‘I’d often find certain positions very painful but because I didn’t know why, I would just change the position so I wouldn’t be uncomfortable’.
In 2010, Elizabeth got pregnant and delivered a beautiful baby girl. She however continued to get her periods throughout the pregnancy. She gave birth to her daughter prematurely at 32 weeks.
Terribly, she was sacked from her banking job as she was always off sick.
She had unbearable abdominal pains after child birth and struggled to go to toilet.
Elizabeth Amoaa recounted that ‘My pregnancy was not normal because I’d have a scan and doctors would say oh we can’t locate the child, then they would say the baby is fine, then they would say oh we can’t see the baby again’.
The former banker added that ‘I would get admitted to hospital and they would say you haven’t had a miscarriage so where is the blood coming from? They then put it down to the fibroids which they said were growing with the child.
‘They kept concentrating on the fibroids and saying I had a low immune system but they didn’t really investigate any further’.
Elizabeth Amoaa later found out that, her daughter had survived simply because she was in the right side womb–rather than in the heavily infected left womb.
‘Though I’m blessed to have my daughter, I feel very upset and annoyed as they should’ve done a proper investigation. If there was an early intervention I wouldn’t have to gone through what I have today’.
The turning point came when the Ghanaian born and her husband moved to Germany where they had access to private healthcare in 2015.
‘Doctors over there investigated me and that’s when they diagnosed me with a double womb and double vagina after doing key-hole surgery’, she said.
Elizabeth agreed to have a Hysterosalpingogram, where dye is inserted in the womb of women who are struggling to get pregnant, three times over six months and eventually she was able to conceive again and get pregnant in December 2016.
Elizabeth Amoaa is now involved in advocacy on female gynecological conditions in Ghana, especially in deprived communities where such conditions are seen as witchcraft.
SOURCE: Kasatintin.com
Editor’s Note: Article written with additional resources from Mirror online.
