“Women’s health, aside from cancer, is not on the radar, not part of the conversation.” — Dr Nicholas Leyland, Professor and Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, The Michael G DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University If you’re a woman, you probably have fibroids — non-cancerous growths of the uterus, ranging in size from seedling to cantaloupe, that often appear during childbearing years. By age 50, as many as three out of four of women have fibroids and a third are symptomatic due to bleeding or the effect of the mass on surrounding tissue.

“It’s fibroids, not thyroid!” Actor/ESL Teacher Natasha Fiorino

Most women have fibroids, yet no one has heard of them and so when Natasha Fiorino drummed up the courage to tell her boss about why she would need some time off, it became like that telephone game we played as kids: word got around and people thought she had a thyroid problem. But Natasha’s boss understood and supported her, proving that talking about fibroids (not thyroid) works.

Fibroids are the leading cause of hysterectomy — the second most common surgery performed on women (after Caesarian section). Over half a million hysterectomies are performed each year in North America. One out [...] continue the story

“You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever…”

Donald Trump disparagingly refers to it as “wherever”. It’s the background of every ultrasound baby picture including those overshared by Michael Bublé on Instagram…

It’s the place where we were all implanted and spent the first, most carefree nine months of our lives, but is there a more maligned, disrespected or mistreated organ than the uterus?

The ancient Greeks who gave us democracy, tragedy and the Pythagorean theorem also came up with the wacky wandering womb. In Plato’s Timaeus, the uterus is described as a living creature that travels around the body, a uterine Randle McMurphy inciting the other organs to rebellion and generally causing mayhem, both physical and emotional.

The Greek word for uterus is hystera (ὑστέρα) which begat the diagnosis hysteria and expectant descriptions of errant behaviour–George Beard wrote a catalogue of hysterical symptoms running seventy-five pages, a list that he considered incomplete. The etymological line of causality blames the uterus for hysteria and therefore it’s no surprise that hysterectomy was a common treatment.

From ancient Greece to as recently as the 1950s, hysteria has been used as a catchall to dismiss women as frail and flighty. Today, pre-menstrual syndrome, the fearsome Rosemary’s Baby of hysteria, has taken its place. Rather than high-strung hysterical women who can’t handle the stresses of life, women in the throes of PMS are monsters of hormonal imbalance. [...] continue the story