Amy Schumer is recovering after undergoing surgery to treat endometriosis, during which she says her uterus and appendix were removed.
The 40-year-old comedian and actress, who underwent IVF last year in a bid to conceive her second child, revealed her recent procedure in an Instagram video posted on Saturday, Sept. 18. Schumer spoke to her husband, Chris Fischer, who filmed her as she lay on a hospital bed.
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WATCH HERE"So it's the morning after my surgery for endometriosis and my uterus is out," the star said. "The doctor found 30 spots of endometriosis that he removed. He removed my appendix because the endometriosis had attacked it. There was a lot of blood in my uterus and I'm sore and I have some like, gas pains."
Endometriosis is a female reproductive disease in which abnormal tissue grows outside the uterus. While there are more conservative treatments than a hysterectomy--a procedure fellow endometriosis sufferer Lena Dunham opted for as well in 2018, the ailment typically returns even after removal of just the affected tissue.
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And for many women, living with endometriosis can be debilitating as it can cause extremely painful menstrual periods.
In late August, Schumer reached out on Instagram to fans suffering from both before deleting her post. On Saturday, she captioned her video, "If you have really painful periods you may have #endometriosis."
"Peace out endometriosis!" Schumer wrote on her Instagram Story.
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In addition to painful periods, severe endometriosis can also, as Schumer showed, spread to organs other than the uterus. And it can also cause infertility by making the uterus less receptive to an embryo and also affect egg quality. While Schumer was able to conceive and give birth to a son, Gene David Fischer, now 2, she struggled to get pregnant again and underwent a round of IVF in early 2020, which yielded many eggs and resulted in the creation of one normal embryo, which she and Chris opted to freeze.
Schumer has been open about her battle with both endometriosis and adenomyosis, a similar ailment. She has also spoken about her tough pregnancy with Gene, during which she suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum--or severe nausea and vomiting, and the difficulty of going through fertility treatments.
"We did IVF, and IVF was really tough on me," she said on NBC's Sunday Today with Willie Geist in August 2020. "I don't think I could ever do IVF again. And so I decided that I can't be pregnant ever again. We thought about a surrogate, but I think we're gonna hold off for right now."
