Real Housewives of Potomac reality star Gizelle Bryant is sharing a “painful” experience during a recent trip to her doctor’s office that completely “caught [her] off guard.”
In the BRAVO TV franchise’s latest episode Sunday, she opened up to her best friend Robyn Dixon (and the world) about having her fibroids biopsied.
“My doctors have been monitoring me for about three years, and my uterus fibroids are so huge that they can’t just remove the fibroids,” Bryant said. “They’ve got to also remove my uterus, which is just like a full-blown hysterectomy.”
The mother of three said that she “broke out in a sweat” thinking about all the complications that could happen during the operation.
“The act of doing it is terrifying,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to walk around, you know, what’s sex [going to] be like? I mean, I don’t know, but there’s no way around it.”
She added that she had to console and comfort herself, knowing that the procedure was something she would have to undergo alone.
“I was holding my own hands. I was consoling myself.”
News of the unexpected hysterectomy comes just days before she was supposed to be flying out to help celebrate her co-star Ashley Darby’s birthday trip to Mexico. It is still unknown whether she will be able to join her and the other ladies on the trip.
Fibroids are non-cancerous tumors found in the uterus and are the main reason women undergo hysterectomies or myomectomies, according to McLeod Health.
“Studies show that African-American women suffer fibroids 2 to 3 times more than white women,” says McLeod OB/GYN Dr. Monica Ploetzke. “We also know that Black women tend to experience fibroids at a younger age and often more severely than their white counterparts.”
Ploetzke added that “25% of African-American women will suffer from fibroids by the age of 25 and 80% will have them by age 50 (compared with 70% for white females).
Because Black women suffer fibroids at an earlier age, they also are 2 to 3 times more likely to undergo surgery.”
