According to the World Health Organization, endometriosis affects around ten per cent of women and girls of reproductive age globally—including Amy Schumer—but its most persistent and debilitating symptoms are usually shrugged off as just part of being a woman.
As Schumer says in her episode of Paramount+'s new reality series The Checkup With Dr. David Agus, this can make living with the chronic illness a “lonely disease.” She tells Dr. Agus, “You know, for months, I had been complaining of pain…it was just this pain you can't see. And, you know, there is the inclination to always think a woman is just being dramatic.”
“You tell someone you get really bad cramps, and they're like, ‘Oh, it's being a woman,’ and you're like, ‘No, it's irregular,’” she says in the show. “I've been in so much pain, you know, my whole life—not just the week of my period. It's during ovulation. I would hopefully get a good week a month where I wasn't in pretty significant pain, still trying to achieve, still trying to go through life. It's been really difficult.”
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For whatever reason (perhaps because of that inclination to think women are being dramatic), there is no real cure for endometriosis, nor is there any effective treatment. There isn't even a way to positively diagnose the disease that doesn't involve surgery. Sometimes the only treatment for endometriosis pain is to remove the uterus altogether, which is what Schumer did. After getting her hysterectomy and appendix removed because of the endo, she posted a video to Instagram about the procedure. “My pain is real. Your pain is real,” she said. “We have to advocate for ourselves. We have to speak up. And you know what? I'm worried this video is annoying, but I don't care, because I hope that it helps one woman go and find out why she's in so much pain.”
If this sounds at all familiar, you may remember Lena Dunham's 2018 essay in Vogue about making the difficult choice to get a hysterectomy to treat her own debilitating endometriosis at age 31. The musician Halsey has also been open about her endometriosis, delivering an emotional speech in 2018 at the Endometriosis Foundation of America.
After her surgeries, Amy Schumer told Dr. Agus, “I feel like someone lifted this veil that had been over me, and I just felt like a different person and like a new mum.”
This story was originally published by GLAMOUR (US).
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