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Lena Dunham Reveals She's Had Her Left Ovary Removed In Heartbreaking Post

Rachel Andrews

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Lena Dunham Reveals She's Had Her Left Ovary Removed In Heartbreaking Post

Featured Image Credit: PA Images

Lena Dunham shared a heartbreaking Instagram post with her followers on Wednesday, in which the actress explained she'd had her left ovary removed as a result of endometriosis.

Endometriosis is a painful condition that causes tissue to grow outside of the uterus and can cause debilitating pain, among other symptoms.

The actress shared an image of herself in a hospital bed explaining that her left ovary, which had been encased by scar tissue, had been causing a great amount of pain over the last month.

Captioning her emotional post, Lena shared: "Yesterday I had a two hour surgery to remove my left ovary, which was encased in scar tissue & fibrosis, attached to my bowel and pressing on nerves that made it kinda hard to walk/pee/vamp.

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"Over the last month it got worse and worse until I was simply a burrito posing as a human."

Lena went on to explain she'd spent nine hours in post-op recovery with very low blood pressure with her family around her.

Creator and star of HBO comedy, Girls, Lena had a hysterectomy - a surgical operation to remove all or part of the uterus - at the end of last year, to try and rid herself of the debilitating disease, although she's still been suffering from symptoms since the surgery.

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The hysterectomy meant she could no longer conceive children naturally - a highly emotional decision she'd had to come to terms with, which she discussed in a self-written essay for Vogue.

Lena was unable to finish promoting her new show Camping starring Jennifer Garner as she was too poorly ahead of the surgery.

"A lot of people commented on my last post about being too sick to finish promoting my show by saying my hysterectomy should have fixed it (I mean *should* is a weird one). That I should get acupuncture and take supplements (I do). That I should see a therapist because it's clearly psychological (year 25, y'all. These are the fruits!)," continued Lena.

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She added: "But a big lesson I've learned in all this is that health, like most things, isn't linear- things improve and things falter and you start living off only cranberry juice from a sippy cup/sleeping on a glorified heating pad but you're also happier than you've been in years."

Lena also shared a number of pictures of herself and the hospital's staff on her Instagram story, as well as her family members who were by her side the whole way.

American actress Lena explained that while she felt 'so so so lucky' to have health insurance as well as enough funds to pay for aftercare out of her own pocket, she still felt stunned by her body.

Credit: Instagram/Lena Dunham
Credit: Instagram/Lena Dunham
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Hitting out at the country's private health care service, she wrote: "I'm simultaneously shocked by what my body is and isn't doing for me and red with rage that access to medical care is a privilege and not a right in this country and that women have to work extra hard just to prove what we already know about our own bodies and beg for what we need to be well.

"It's humiliating."

It seems like Lena is radiating as much positivity about her health as possible to others that may be in a similar situation to her.

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She continued: "My health not being a given has paid spiritual dividends I could never have predicted and it's opened me up in wild ways and it's given me a mission: to advocate for those of us who live at the cross section of physical and physic pain, to remind women that our stories don't have to look one way, our pain is our gain."

Topics: Celebrity News

Rachel Andrews
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