Emma Watkins is most well-known in Australia as the woman behind the Yellow Wiggle in rudely-successful kids music group, The Wiggles. But she’s also making a name for herself as a champion for normalising speaking up about endometriosis, a condition she’s suffered with since her teen years but only recently was diagnosed with.
This week, Emma went deep on discovering her endometriosis – and the long, painful journey it took to get there – with Australian Women’s Weekly.
“As a dancer I’ve always been used to pushing through, so even though I was bleeding every day for over six months, initially I thought it was just touring and constantly changing time zones,” she told the magazine.
She said that initially, she felt like she couldn’t talk about it.
‘I guess there was also an assumption on my part that it wasn’t appropriate to mention [the symptoms],” she said.
But when she did, her bandmates (one of which is her husband, Lachlan Gillespie) were super supportive.
They are the most caring, gentle men but it just sort of snowballed and before I knew it, I was having an operation,’ she said.
Emma recently spoke at length about the moment she was diagnosed to The Daily Telegraph.
‘I lost so much blood I had an infusion, and that’s when it started to hit me. I had had really bad periods since school pretty much, but when the doctors are actually in there, they can see the severity. It seemed worse than I had thought, and [worse than] they thought as well.’
Emma had successful endometriosis surgery in April, and says that it was a no-brainer to be candid about it all.
“It was quite frightening for me the first time I went on TV and talked about it – the cysts, the bleeding, getting all the facts straight. I talked about it very bluntly but it didn’t occur to me to speak any other way. And I received so much support from people thanking me for speaking so frankly.”
Endometriosis occurs when the tissue that is similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside of it. Some signs of endometriosis can be painful periods, pain with intercourse, excessive bleeding and painful bowel movements. If you think you might have endometriosis, see your GP.
