Lena Dunham on her womb removal: "The pain became a full-time job"
We know Lena Dunham as a tough woman. But now the "girl" actress shows herself from another side: vulnerable, broken and emotionally she reports in Vogue about her terrible ordeal, which now forced her to have her uterus removed.
"I was just busy with pain"
Lena Dunham is suffering? exactly how about 10 percent of all women in Germany? Endometriosis, a chronic abdominal disease that is often associated with almost unbearable pain. For ten years she tried to cope with the symptoms, writes the 31-year-old. Last summer, the pain had become so bad that she could no longer live with it.
"I was just working on somehow coping with this new pain level, it became like a second job, I went to massage therapy, to pain therapy, to color therapy, to acupuncture, to yoga."
When none of this helps to improve her quality of life, she hits the hardest decision of her life so far: she chooses a hysterectomy? she had wished all her life, one day to give birth to a child.
"I could not say goodbye"
"I never had a single doubt about having children. [...] As a kid, I stuffed my underwear and strutted through our living room [...] I always got up that moment when my stomach swells naturally [...] but I also know that something is wrong with my uterus, and I can not be anyone's mother with this pain. "
Meanwhile, Lena Dunham has the surgery behind her. The operation went without complications and physically she resembles a "champion", she writes. Psychologically she has not yet processed the experience. "While I had to fight to get my pain taken seriously, I did not have time to deal with my fear or sadness, I could not say goodbye, I made a decision that was not mine at all."
