During her recent appearance on Soha Ali Khan’s podcast ‘All About Her,’ the ‘Mohabbatein’ actress revealed how a delayed diagnosis made her symptoms difficult to understand and how she initially believed the pain was a normal part of being a woman.
Soha Ali Khan asked, “How long had you been in pain before you actually got the answer?” To which Shamita Shetty responded, "I think, in my case, I kind of dragged it on because I wasn't given the right diagnosis initially. Every time I experienced certain symptoms, I'd tell myself, 'Maybe this is normal. When I first went to my gynecologist with these concerns, before I was introduced to Dr. Warty, she did all the routine tests, a Pap smear and everything else to make sure everything was okay.”
“When those reports came back normal, no one thought to check if there could be something more. It was just left at that. So every time the symptoms returned, I'd think, 'Nothing showed up last time, so maybe this is normal. Maybe it's just part and parcel of being a woman.' Like you rightly said, we don't really express the pain we feel. So many things whether it's period pain or anything related to our hormones are normalized for women. We're just expected to live with them. For me, the intensity of the pain really increased about six to eight months before I eventually had surgery.”
The actress went on to state, “Before that, it wasn't as severe. I'm someone who has a very high pain tolerance. I've dealt with a lot of injuries over the years, so I tend to push through pain.But when the pain started waking me up from my sleep, that's when I realized something was seriously wrong. My body was trying to tell me that I needed answers.”
“I was also very confused because all of this happened around the same time I was learning about perimenopause. There was already so much happening with my hormones that I couldn't tell whether what I was experiencing was just part of perimenopause or whether something else was wrong.”
The latest episode features Shamita Shetty in conversation with gynecological surgeon Dr. Neeta Warty, a pioneer in endoscopic and laparoscopic gynecological procedures.
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