July is Fibroid Awareness Month, which I guess makes it time a good time to get mine taken out. Invasive surgery in a pandemic isn’t my idea of a sweet time, but these womb rocks have got to GO. Here’s a thread on an underreported issue that plagues so many people with uteruses

(NOTE, for brevity I‘ll use the term “women”, but I am referring to a person of any gender with a uterus. Trans experiences are routinely dismissed and discrimated against in medicine and it must stop.)

In the US, 40% of white women and 60% of Black women develop uterine fibroids by age 35. By age 50, those numbers climb to almost 70% and over 80% respectively. That is an A LOT of people, and many of us never learn about this at all.

Fibroids are non-cancerous tumors/growths called leiomyomas that grow in or on the uterus. It is very rare for these growths to be turn out to be cancerous, but it does happen (1 in 1000). The only way to know if a fibroid is actually a sarcoma is to surgically remove and biopsy

Women can suffer painful periods, heavy cramping and major hormonal issues including depression and mood swings for YEARS before they are diagnosed. Doctors routinely dismiss these issues as PMS or PMDD without any testing. Menstrual pain is considered “normal” and it’s not.

The regular dismissal of women’s pain by medical doctors is even more pronounced for Black women, who are not only disproportionately affected by fibroids, but who are victims of rampant implicit bias in medicine everyday. WE MUST ADVOCATE FOR OURSELVES.

It is beyond exhausting and constantly infuriating to suffer physically and to have to be an activist for medical justice and your own health at the same time.

Adding insult to injury, the most common “solution” doctors propose for women suffering from uterine fibroids is HYSTERECTOMY (removal of uterus), despite the fact that surgical and procedural alternatives exist but are rarely offered.