This excerpt is from the Invisible Women Newsletter. Click here to join the 50k+ subscribers and read the full article.
Along with finding out about finding out more about Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, who has described several leading Democrats as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they made,” this newsletter highlights story of Eleanor Thom, a talented comedian and writer who has seen her life and work upended by endometriosis.
Her story is worth telling because it is representative of the situation that far too many women in the UK (and globally) find themselves in today. And she was kind enough to spend several hours over zoom telling it to me last week.
As I wrote in “Left too long”: a very female story,
“Like one in ten women globally, Eleanor has endometriosis, a painful disease caused by uterus cells growing outside of the uterus. And like the cells in the uterus, these cells follow a monthly cycle of building up and then breaking down and bleeding. But unlike in the uterus, there is no mechanism for the body to get rid of them. So they build up, causing inflammation, scarring, and often extreme pain. Many patients struggle with infertility.
By this stage in her life Eleanor had already been through six surgeries and been put into (and taken out of) medically induced menopause. Along with hormones and painkillers, she was also on a strong nerve-pain medication that left her exhausted and struggling to form sentences (“a bit of a problem if you’re doing comedy acting”). But despite all these radical and invasive treatments, Eleanor’s condition continued to get worse and that is because despite endometriosis affecting one in ten women globally, we don’t know how to cure it. We don’t even know what causes it.”