Carla Cressy worked as a model from the age of five until she was 17, but kept collapsing on shoots. <\/p>\n
“It was really embarrassing and I couldn’t do it anymore,” she says.<\/p>\n
From the age of 13, when she started her periods, she was plagued by excruciating pain but she was only finally diagnosed with endometriosis when she was 25.<\/p>\n
By then, doctors had removed her appendix, mistakenly thinking she had acute appendicitis. <\/p>\n
“I was hospitalised for chronic constipation several times. I wasn’t able to eat, I was vomiting and in such severe pain but I kept being told it was a stomach bug.”<\/p>\n
Carla ended up retraining as a beauty therapist because she felt she was “unemployable and unreliable” due to her health.<\/p>\n
“I would have a client, then sit in a boiling hot bath to ease my stomach pain. It was horrible, but it was the only way I could earn a living,” the 35-year-old from Essex says.<\/p>\n
One in six women with endometriosis are estimated to leave the workplace due to the condition, which causes tissue similar to the lining of the womb to grow outside it.<\/p>\n
Carla recently gave evidence to an ongoing inquiry, external<\/a> into how the condition affects women in the workplace, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is currently no legislation in the UK to ensure workers with menstrual health conditions are treated fairly if they need time off work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carla Cressy worked as a model from the age of five until she was 17, but kept collapsing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-699402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}