Endometriosis is a disease characterized by the growth outside the uterus of tissue similar to the lining of this organ, causing pain, infertility or both. According to WHO data, this disease affects approximately 10% (190 million) of women and girls of reproductive age worldwide. Although in recent years, celebrities As Alexa Chung or Lena Dunham have spoken publicly and in the first person about this condition, it has not always been the case and it has been an invisible condition for a long time. In fact, Marilyn Monroe herself he had to live it in a silence and ignorance that could have directly influenced his premature death.
Although we now have, quickly and at the click of a button, tests to dismantle those who do not want to believe that endometriosis is more than a “period pain”, the truth is that is about a disease that is really complex and about which many aspects are still unknown. So imagine what it must have been like to suffer it at the time when the actress was triumphing on the big screen.
Delays in filming due to the pain she suffered and that caused her to be branded as a diva, twelve abortions, several operations, use of powerful painkillers… Her biographers argue that she experienced a real ordeal. In fact, they are kept as evidence until some x-rays that were auctioned in 2010 for 36,600 euros.
These are three X-rays that Marilyn Monroe had at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Florida in November 1952. There she was admitted for undergoing surgery for suspected appendicitisalthough it is believed that, in reality, he was hiding from the gallery an intervention related to the disease that caused him unbearable pain.
It is known that, until 1960 (two years before his death), the most advanced resource to control severe cases of endometriosis was the removal of the ovaries. This procedure had purpose of eliminating the periodic stimulation of the endometrial tissue. However, the interpreter refused to undergo said surgery because she wanted to be a mother and she tried several times, but all of them ended with the loss of the fetus.
In fact, it is noted and documented in several biographies about Monroe, that the Hollywood star, who distrusted doctors, entered the operating room in that intervention with a note on her belly asking her to please not have her ovaries removed. The surgeons obeyed.
Marilyn Monroe taped note to her stomach for appendix surgery c.1952
“For God’s sakes Dear Doctor no ovaries removed” pic.twitter.com/08DrudiB38— Old Photos and Bacon (@OldPhotosBacon) June 12, 2014
So, the only alternative left for him to tolerate chronic pain was the use of narcotics, which would eventually lead to the overdose. Furthermore, despite the image of sex symbols Concocted by Hollywood publicists (and continuing to this day), the symptoms of the disease made Monroe’s sex life unpleasant and even painful due to dyspareunia.
The also actor Tony Curtis, with whom he had an affair, has aired his sexual intimacies in various interviews and biographies, going so far as to say that “in bed, I was never sure, before, during or after, where my head was” Already making fun of her saying that “making love to her was like kissing Hitler”.
On the other hand, in your work it seems that endometriosis it earned him a bad reputation behind the cameras. Director Billy Wilder, in an interview, described the shooting of Whit skirts and being crazy as exasperating due to a deconcentrated Marilyn Monroe, who was late for filming and demanded excessive whims, in his opinion.
In an article published in the Journal of Human Reproductive Sciencesdoctor Ian Fraser points out that, for the actress, “the condition was so severe that it wrecked their marriages, their desire for children, their careers, and ultimately their livesBefore the advent of effective conservative surgeries and safe medical therapies, the disease led to progressive use of very strong analgesics, tranquilizers and hypnotic drugs and drug dependence.”
Photos | Netflix