“I was immediately in this grotesque pain and was just leveled—just barreled over, like someone was squeezing me tight from the inside,” Schumer tells TIME. “I just thought, ‘It’s my turn.’”
In a conversation with TIME, Schumer spoke about the years she spent being dismissed, the emotional and physical toll of not being believed, and what she wants every woman to know about advocating for herself in a health care system that too often isn’t listening.
She went home early so many times that her friends turned it into a running joke—one they still tell today. “They go, ‘Is your mom gonna come pick you up, Amy?’” she says. But at the time, there was nothing funny about it. The bloating, the sensitivity, the cramping that arrived like a fist: It was “crippling,” she says, and it pulled her out of her own life again and again.
Getting an answer
She carried that uncertainty into adulthood. Then, in 2019, she had a C-section while delivering her son—and with her abdomen open on the operating table, a surgeon saw what decades of doctors had missed. “It looks like a bomb went off in your body,” she told her. Among the findings: a chocolate cyst on her left ovary, so named because it fills with old blood, causing it to resemble melted chocolate; an appendix being choked; and 33 lesions.
After having surgery to remove her uterus and appendix in 2021, Schumer feels dramatically different today. “I am a new person,” she says. More than anything, she feels like “a new mom,” able to keep up with her 7-year-old son in ways she couldn't before. “I have the energy and the strength to really play with my son,” she says. “I'm just so grateful.”
What bothers her most, she says, is that no one ever stopped to ask why a young girl would invent this kind of pain. “I wasn't trying to get out of anything. I'm a hustler,” she says. “I wanted to stay out later with my friends, with the boy I liked—and I just couldn't.”
Schumer cycled through doctors before one finally took her symptoms seriously—and she wants to know why that’s normal.
She also sees a failure of medical training, especially around diseases that primarily affect women. In her case, doctors were quick to offer the same solution without pushing further. “Just go on birth control,” she says, “and shut up, basically.”
If she had a daughter, she'd send a man to go to doctor’s appointments with her. “It’s sickening to say that,” she says. “But people just listen to men more. Men listen to men more. Women listen to men more.”
The cost of not being believed
That silence can have consequences. By the time Schumer finally had a name for what was happening to her, the disease had been progressing for decades. She was in her late 30s when she was diagnosed; her mother, whose pain Schumer had watched since childhood, didn’t get the same answer until she was 76. As soon as she had her own diagnosis, Schumer called her. “I said, ‘Mom, you have this. I’ve watched you my whole life, crippled with pain,’” she recalls. Her mother brushed it off—“‘No, I don’t have it. I just don’t have it,’” Schumer remembers her mom insisting—until, eventually, she got the diagnosis too. She got a hysterectomy shortly after.
How to advocate for yourself at the doctor
Years of feeling dismissed have changed the way Schumer approaches medical appointments. These days, she writes her questions down beforehand and rehearses what she wants to say. “Practice in the mirror,” she advises others who dread the exam room.
She even has a script for people who freeze in the exam room. Start with the truth, she says: acknowledge the discomfort out loud. “I really don’t want to annoy you, and it’s hard for me to ask you all these questions and pester you—but I’m going to push through for myself.” Saying it that way, she’s found, can make a doctor pause and pay attention.
For all her frustration, Schumer remains hopeful, largely because of who she sees coming up behind her. "We're really relying on the younger generation to help carry us forward," she says. “I'm so encouraged by these young women.” She points people toward groups like The Endometriosis Collective, which is working to change how endometriosis is researched, treated, and understood.
In the end, there's one thing she wants women who recognize themselves in her story to remember. “All women,” she says, “should love themselves like they're their own mother.”
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