General Hospitalstar Kate Mansi is opening up about a harrowing health scare — and how her stepfather came to the rescue.
While starring onDays of Our Livesin 2015, Mansi said she suddenly began to experience intense pain, cramping, and heavy bleeding, compelling her to seek emergency care. But "doctors just kept dismissing it," shetold PEOPLEon Wednesday.
Mansi's doctors suggested it was a complication from IUD implantation, or that it was "just a bad period." But pain and cramping eventually evolved into vomiting, skin discoloration, and a stomach "so distended that I couldn't even zip up my pants."
Still, Mansi felt obligated to meet the strict production demands of a daily soap
"I've never gone through childbirth, but it felt like I was having extreme contractions," Mansi recalled. "They would say action, I would do my scene, and then the second they said cut, I was literally doubled over in pain."
She returned to the emergency room that day, joined by her mom and stepdad, an ob-gyn. Doctors discovered an 11-cm mass in Mansi's abdomen — complications from a previously undetected ovarian cyst — sending the actress into a panic. Her stepdad grew "so frustrated" that, because he was technically free to perform an operation himself as a non-blood relation, "he scrubbed in himself and was like, 'I'm not waiting for an oncologist. I'm gonna do the surgery, or she's not gonna make it.'"
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Mansi explained, "He did a surgery that ended up saving my life."
Mansi made it through emergency surgery and numerous blood transfusions that followed. When she had recovered, "My stepdad told me, 'You have endometriosis and this is what that means.' And that was the first time I had ever even heard that word."
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The Mayo Clinicdefines endometriosis as a painful condition in which tissue that would normally only grow inside the uterus instead develops outside, making it hard for the body to expel. Endometriosis can cause pose major problems to the uterus and ovaries, as well as complicate menstruation and childbirth.
Now fully recovered from the grueling ordeal, Mansi is dedicated to sharing her experience to those living with endometriosis, which theWorld Health Organizationestimates effects 10 percent of women worldwide.
Mansi has directed an upcoming episode ofGeneral Hospital, which she has starred on since 2023, in which her character Kristina's sister Molly (Kristen Vaganos) gets candid about her own struggle with the condition. The actress described her directing approach as choosing not to just focus on "Molly's vulnerability, but her strength and how so many people with endometriosis often hide behind the strength and resiliency so that we don't look weak."
Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly
