The most painful battle of Venus Williams’ life wasn’t fought on the tennis court.
For years, the seven-time tennis Grand Slam champion battled acute period pain, including debilitating cramping, nausea, and bleeding so intense that it caused persistent anemia.
During training at Wimbledon in 2016, her symptoms were so severe that she was left immobilized in the locker room.
“We had a doubles final to play next, and I was just lying on the floor in the locker room, like, ‘It’s gonna pass. It’s gonna pass,” she told TODAY.
In the face of this cyclical suffering, doctors dismissed her symptoms as “normal.”
“It just got too bad, and I couldn’t handle it,” Williams said.
She had previously been diagnosed with fibroids, noncancerous growths of muscle and tissue that form in or on the wall of the uterus. Small fibroids are usually painless, but larger growths can cause pain, swelling, excessive bleeding, GI issues, and bloating, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
While she was aware of these growths, doctors, who monitored her fibroids with ultrasounds, never identified how large they were — nor did they connect them to her intense pain.
“I didn’t know that they were really big,” Williams said. “I didn’t know that they were growing and growing and growing.”
Fairly common, fibroids impact 70% of white women and 80% of Black women before they turn 50.
“I’m sharing now because I was outraged that I didn’t know this was possible. I didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she said. “No one should have to go through this.”
So heavy was Williams’ bleeding that she often wore layers to prevent a bleed-through, while her cramps were routinely so acute she could not pick herself up off the ground.
“As bad as things were for me, crazy amounts of bleeding like you couldn’t imagine … my doctors told me it was normal,” she said. “I never realized (anything) was wrong.”
After her experience at Wimbledon in 2016, her symptoms intensified, and she continued to push through the pain.
She said no matter what, she was going to play tennis — even if it meant she didn’t play well.
In 2017, when she was 37, doctors attributed her symptoms to “part of aging” and again failed to connect them to fibroids.
One doctor even callously joked that her symptoms were “natural birth control,” while others suggested a hysterectomy, an extreme measure Williams was hesitant to pursue.
Last summer, after seeing a random social media post about fibroids that assured “you don’t have to live like this,” Williams dove into researching treatment options, ultimately finding the care she needed at NYU Langone Health Center for Fibroid Care, led by Dr. Taraneh Shirazian.
Shirazian recommended the surgical removal of the fibroids, a procedure known as a myomectomy.
After being dismissed and misdiagnosed by doctors for decades, the tennis superstar was skeptical but ultimately decided to undergo the myomectomy, a decision that has drastically improved her symptoms.
Shirazian maintains that Williams’s struggle is consistent with the lack of care women with fibroid disease find in the US.
“Women do not get the care that they need for fibroid disease,” Shirazian said.
“To me, that’s the part that we should all be thinking about. World-class athlete, superstar. Has access to every doctor, every facility, every option. She went to so many other people before she got care.”
Williams is hopeful that by sharing her story, she can light the way for others living with fibroids.
New research into women’s health reveals that women who spend more than six hours a day sitting double their risk of uterine fibroids.
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