Why Ilana Glazer Is Speaking Out About Pelvic Health

I think about The Golden Girls a lot. Lately, one episode in particular has been on my mind: a 1989 two-parter called “Sick and Tired.” After five months of feeling perpetual brain fog and weakness and exhaustion so intense that she sometimes can’t even speak, Dorothy Zbornak (the late great Bea Arthur), takes herself to a series of doctors (all men) seeking help. She explains her situation in grave and great detail—that she has been so sick that she was forced to quit her job, and she knows inherently that something is going wrong with her body. Over and over again, she is dismissed. One doctor posits that loneliness is her real problem—“How’s your social life? Do you see men?” he asks—and another suggests she take a cruise or dye her hair blonde. Finally, after many attempts, a neurologist takes her symptoms seriously, diagnosing her with CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome).

That episode aired over 30 years ago, but it highlights an issue that continues to affect many women today: How sexism in healthcare can lead to very real symptoms and pain being brushed aside by doctors.

“I remember being 15 years old and my mom and I sitting there and this doctor telling me that my problem was too problematic for him, and just feeling laughed at and so angry,” says actor and comedian Ilana Glazer, describing one encounter with a urologist in her conservative Long Island hometown. He was just one in a long series of doctors who dismissed the pain that Glazer suffered through for most of her life. “I started experiencing pelvic pain at a very young age, which is four,” Glazer says. “That’s when I remember first experiencing it and it was chronic pain from ages four to 24.” She told her mother about the pain at age seven. Later, Glazer would learn that she’d been experiencing urethral spasms, but her pediatrician gave her a yeast infection cream. “I believe the unconscious purpose of it was to have a numbing effect and not to come back to him with more complications,” she says. She was later mis-prescribed UTI antibiotics nearly a dozen times; and another urologist told her the pain was her fault, a result of having sex with her high school boyfriend.

It wasn’t until Glazer met a doctor years later whose daughter was, coincidentally, suffering with the same pelvic issues that she was taken seriously. And it wasn’t until she was in college that Glazer would finally understand that her physical anguish had a mental tipping point. “I look back at my pelvic floor as where I held my anxiety and depression,” says Glazer. Her path out of pain would be multi-pronged: an antidepressant, talk therapy, a shift forward in her career when she entered the comedy world (“I think that a big part of my anxiety was, ‘am I going to be the person that I want to be?’”); and, most impactful, pelvic floor physical therapy. Her Brooklyn-based pelvic floor physical therapist Dr. Kristi Latham would do internal massage working out knots in her labia, massage through her bellybutton, do biofeedback (where a practitioner uses various instruments to monitor bodily functions then makes suggestions basked on the feedback), and offer her a toolkit for how to deal with the pain at home. “I couldn’t believe I wasn’t alone,” says Glazer.