When young women share personal stories about their health, it educates and inspires other women to care for themselves. Marsai Martin is one of those young women who inspires her audience through entrepreneurial activations, collaborations and productions.

Now, her audience is inspired to get routinely checked at the GYNO after she got candid about her ovarian cyst journey in December 2022.

Originally, during an Instagram live Martin explained her scary experience after being diagnosed with an ovarian cyst in 2018. A year later, Martin has detailed her decision to have surgery in an op-ed piece in Women’s Health.

“…when I was 17, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had extreme cramps and I was so nauseous, I wasn’t able to eat or drink. It felt like I couldn’t move. The slightest sip of water would make me projectile vomit. I had lower back pain, dizziness, migraines, and tender breasts, and on top of that. The pain had been constant from the moment I woke up, and it was so unbearable that I finally went to the ER around 8 p.m.,” Martin wrote.

“…and finally, at 18, I decided to have a surgery to remove it and relieve the pain I was experiencing. At the time, I couldn’t find any information from people who had been going through the same thing,” Martin wrote.

Martin revealed that her search online fell short after being unable to find people who looked like her experiencing ovarian cysts or even personal first-person experiences.

 

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“I was scared after receiving my diagnosis. As a young Black woman, I wanted to hear from women who looked like me that I was going to be okay. Roughly one in 10 women experience ovarian cysts, but they’re usually benign, don’t cause pain, and often go away on their own, per Cedars-Sinai,” she explained.

“I’m now 18 years old—I look things up on blogs and I like to hear from other women about their experiences. But there was nothing online. I couldn’t find a lot of information about ovarian cysts, or first-person accounts from people I could relate to,” she added.

After Martin learned that women of color often deal with complications connected to their reproductive health, maternal mortality rate, and are 1.5 times more likely to die from cervical cancer she felt it was necessary to take care of herself.

“Eventually, I came to realize that I could be that voice for people and fill that void. That’s why I spoke out on Instagram,” Martin wrote. “I wanted to share my experience so that other women wouldn’t suffer in silence. Before my diagnosis, I thought the crippling period pain and severe nausea I went through each month during my cycle was normal. So, I resisted going to the ER for my period pain for years,” she added.

“And if I hadn’t sought out help, I probably would have continued trying to tough it out. I would have continued to go through intense, debilitating pain every month during my period,” she said.

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