US actress Jaime King has revealed it took nine doctors to uncover her polycystic ovarian syndrome
The model and actress told E! Online that she felt pain from an early age when she started her periods but was told it was ‘normal’.
Now, the 43-year-old mother-of-two has told how her journey to motherhood was a heartbreaking battle of miscarriages and IVF.
She told E! News: “What I was taught is, if you are a woman and you menstruate, it’s painful and it sucks, and you just deal with it. Like cramps, headaches, throwing up, this and that, it’s just par for the course.
“I just assumed that’s how sh*tty it was – that was three weeks out of a month, I’m going to be really sick and not know what is going on with me, and have a hard time sitting, standing, walking, moving, just functioning about life.”
Jaime said she struggled to complete modelling jobs for magazines such as Vogue, Seventeen, and Allure and on runways for the likes of Chanel and Christian Dior
It was then that she started to look for answers. For years she visited eight different doctors who all failed to give her the diagnosis she eventually got from the ninth doctor aged 26, who was an obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr Randy Harris, who told her she had endometriosis, adenomyosis, and polycystic ovarian syndrome.
Jaime said: “He was the first doctor that said to me ‘women are not supposed to be in pain’. It was the first time I felt seen.
“It’s completely unacceptable that you spend years and years and years and years of your life suffering because there has been no education, no awareness.”
The actress has teamed up with a chronic care platform. Allara, that specialises in providing virtual care for women who suffer from PCOS
She said: “You get a whole team of people that support you. You can get lab work done, you can actually get more than ten minutes with your doctor, and you can message them. It takes a village when you have what I call this silent disease.”
Jaime was told in her 20s that she would not have children. But after an astonishing 60 intrauterine inseminations, five rounds of IVF, and five miscarriages, she gave birth to her first child, James Knight, now eight, with estranged husband, Kyle Newman.
Two years later she went on to have Leo Thomas, now six, with even more serious complications, including a congenital heart condition that was corrected when he was four days old.
She said her support system was the reason she was able to be open about her fertility struggle. But nerves got to her the night before the interview was due to be released.
But as soon as the interview hit the streets, she was overwhelmed by the number of women who reached out to tell her their stories and relate to what she had and was going through.
Did you struggle to get a PCOS diagnosis? We’d like to hear your story, email mystory@ivfbabble.com.
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