"Real Housewives of Atlanta" star Porsha Williams revealed she underwent an emergency partial hysterectomy in May after doctors discovered 21 fibroids during surgery, a disclosure she says is meant to push women to advocate for their own health.
Williams, 45, laid out the details in a personal essay for Glamour published Friday and in a sit-down interview with Gayle King on CBS Mornings the same day. The Bravo personality wrote that the ordeal began at what was supposed to be a routine fertility appointment about freezing her eggs. Her doctor found more than 15 large fibroids, along with endometriosis and an additional diagnosis involving her uterine lining.
She asked whether she could avoid losing her uterus. The answer was no. Her doctor told her she needed a partial hysterectomy but could keep her ovaries. When surgeons operated in May, they found even more growths than expected, 21 fibroids total, the largest one the size of a cantaloupe. Page Six reported Williams described the surgery as having "saved my life."
Williams wrote in her Glamour essay that the fibroids had silently wrecked her health for years. She said she had not connected the dots between the growths and a string of symptoms that had become part of daily life.
"I hadn't realized the fibroids were behind my migraines, my low iron levels, or how stressed my body had been just from everyday life."
The damage went further. Williams wrote that the fibroids had grown large enough to close off more than 60 percent of her birth canal and were putting dangerous pressure on her bladder from their sheer weight. She said she had lost the ability to have sex because of the obstruction.
That level of physical deterioration, happening quietly, without a clear diagnosis, is the kind of story that lands differently when a public figure puts her name on it. Williams told King on CBS Mornings that she wants other women to stop guessing at what is wrong and start demanding answers from their doctors.
"We have to stop diagnosing ourselves. There are so many different things when it comes to a woman that you need to get checked, and we need to learn to advocate for ourselves."
She added that seeing someone in her position speak openly about fibroids might have changed her own timeline. Williams said she had to ask her own doctor to check for fibroids after she noticed something was wrong, the screening was not automatic.
"If I saw somebody like me sitting here with you talking about fibroids, it would have clicked to ask for it. I had to ask my doctor to check for fibroids after something was wrong."
The surgery saved her life, but it closed a door she was not ready to shut. Williams, who suffered a miscarriage roughly six years before welcoming her daughter Pilar in 2019, wrote that waking up after the procedure brought an immediate sense of loss.
"I woke up after the surgery and thought, 'A part of me is gone.'"
She wrote that the hysterectomy meant she could never carry another child and could not even have eggs retrieved for a surrogate. Public figures across the spectrum have opened up about serious health crises in recent months, and Williams's account fits a broader pattern of women using their platforms to push for earlier screening and more aggressive follow-up.
"On top of it all was the pain of knowing I'd never carry another child, and that I couldn't even have eggs retrieved for a surrogate. That door had officially closed."
Williams also pushed back against the stigma she says surrounds the procedure. She wrote that too many women treat a hysterectomy as something shameful, a marker of diminished womanhood, rather than a medical necessity.
"Fibroids aren't something we usually talk about as women, and neither are hysterectomies. There's a stigma to it, as if you're somehow less of a woman without your uterus."
She noted that at 45, she was already heading toward perimenopause and did not want anything throwing her hormones off further. Keeping her ovaries, as her doctor had planned, was part of managing that transition.
Williams's medical crisis came during a stretch of personal upheaval. She split from Dennis McKinley, the father of her daughter Pilar, in 2020. She married Simon Guobadia in 2022 and divorced him roughly three years later. She has been dating Patrice "Sway" McKinney since last year. Sudden medical emergencies can strike public figures at any stage, as recent health scares in Washington have shown, and Williams's account is a reminder that serious conditions can build silently behind the noise of everyday life.
Through all of it, Williams wrote, her 7-year-old daughter Pilar has been her anchor. She called Pilar her "lifesaver" long before the surgery and said the experience deepened that feeling.
"I've always called her my lifesaver, since she gave me my purpose, and now that feels even more true. I really was chosen to be her mom."
Williams wrote in her Glamour essay that since the surgery, she feels more present and more grateful for the life she has, a shift she attributes directly to no longer carrying the physical burden that fibroids had imposed for years.
Public figures sharing deeply personal stories, whether about parenting decisions or life-threatening diagnoses, can cut through the noise in ways that clinical public-health campaigns rarely do. Williams is betting her story will push at least one woman to ask her doctor the question she almost didn't ask herself.
No government program or awareness campaign replaces a patient who walks into a doctor's office and demands answers. Williams learned that the hard way, and she is making sure other women hear it.