From a young age, all Jaime King knew was pain.
“What I was taught is, if you’re a woman and you menstruate, it’s painful and it sucks and you just deal with it,” the actress recently detailed to E! News. “Like, cramps, headaches, throwing up, this and that, it’s just sort of par for the course.”
With conversations around painful periods, really any periods, largely “stigmatized,” she continued, “I just assumed that’s how s–tty it was—that three weeks out of every month, I’m going to be really sick and not know what’s going on with me and have a hard time sitting, standing, walking, moving, just functioning throughout my life.”
Being unable to walk three-quarters of the month not being super conducive to the thriving modeling career she’d launched at age 14—posing for the likes of Vogue, Allure and Seventeen while strutting down Chanel and Christian Dior runways—the Nebraska native began seeking out answers. But after years of playing physician bingo, it wasn’t until she consulted with obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Randy Harris, “my ninth doctor,” she noted, that she finally received a proper diagnosis.