About
Us.

I founded DO YOU ENDO in 2017 during a time when I was desperately clinging to the words of every doctor and “specialist” I met. It was the winter of 2017, and I was in graduate school at The New School for Social Research. I was constantly in and out of the hospital between classes, trying to balance my course load while working as a freelance journalist. (I also had a few in-office positions, but that’s a story for another time.)

The pain was excruciating, and to be frank, I was urinating blood and experiencing a burning sensation that only Satan himself could bear. Little did I know that I had Interstitial Cystitis (IC) in addition to endo, but I didn’t even get an official diagnosis until the next year!

It took 14 years and seven different doctors to get answers, and my first surgery (in 2018) was an absolute nightmare. My surgeon performed ablation—which only burns the surface of the disease—instead of excision, which is the gold standard because it cuts out the entire lesion, root and all.

By the time I finally went in for my second (life-changing) surgery, my left ovary was literally glued to my pelvic sidewall, and my sciatic pain was so bad I could barely move or get out of bed.

My surgeons, Tamer A. Seckin, MD, FACOG (co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America), and Amanda Chu, MD, saved my life. (I also want to give a shoutout to my amazing urologist, Matthew Lemer, MD.) But the reality of this disease is that even with excision, I have a five- to 10-year window before I may need surgery again. It’s a relentless cycle.

A few months before I graduated, I took a design class taught by Juliette Cezzar. Our assignment was to create something, anything, that we were passionate about and could produce to show the class by semester’s end. So, I thought: why don’t I create a safe space for people like me to rant, talk, and find community over our shared trauma and experiences? I had no idea it would take off the way it did.

We grew a community on Instagram—11,000 followers strong. But because we refused to sugarcoat women’s health, we were permanently deactivated by Meta for posting “period content.” All those connections disappeared overnight.

We built this site so we never have to worry about being silenced for telling the truth about our bodies again.

— Tabitha Britt, Founding Editor-in-Chief