ENDO METRIOSIS: Seeking a SILVER LINING
Who’d have thought bubbly Cyndi Lauper, who convinced a generation that ‘girls just wanna have fu-un’, alternated making her albums with hospital stays for excruciating pain? Or that when Susan Sarandon fainted in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she was also fainting and bleeding off set?
Yet these and a slew of other celebs – Lena Dunham, Padma Lakshmi and Whoopi Goldberg, – are among the estimated one in 10 women with endometriosis. For all this, it’s a widely misunderstood condition. And even with several support and advocacy groups being established (Lakshmi’s Endometriosis Foundation of America; Joburg sufferer Lynne Zurnamer’s Endometriosis Society SA), diagnosis is often a long time coming, causing women to lose precious years in their prime, and costing them in careers, finances, relationships, social life, family life and self-perception.
It takes, on average, seven years and seven primary care visits before a specialist referral brings an accurate diagnosis, says
