A mother-daughter story of a painful, misunderstood disease is turning into a teachable moment.
By using their personal experiences as case studies for research, Larissa Strath, Ph.D., and her mother Carolyn Strath are revealing the suffering and confusion around uterine fibroids and endometriosis.
Their unique collaboration connects the daughter Larissa, an assistant professor in the University of Florida Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, with the mother, a retired schoolteacher from Toronto. Both suffered similar symptoms for decades before getting the care they needed.
Diseases of the uterus and its lining, the endometrium, are very common and very commonly overlooked. They can also be as painful as appendicitis, as Larissa learned from direct experience.
Painful Meeting
For three days while attending a conference in 2023, Larissa had horrible abdominal pain, but she tried to ignore it because of her history with irregular menstruation and chronic pelvic pain. Finally, she went to an urgent care clinic and was rushed into surgery to have her appendix removed.
“Thank God the doctor inquired about my appendix, because it was about to explode,” Larissa said. That level of extreme pain had been normalized by family history and by physicians who had claimed it was ‘just womanhood.’ It was not.
Larissa wants to start real conversations about women’s pain. Why do physicians often dismiss it? Larissa spent 19 years before being diagnosed with endometriosis, and her mother Carolyn suffered for 25 years.
Due to extreme anemia, Carolyn had a complete hysterectomy in her forties. Another 10 years passed before a new primary care physician noticed something in her chart about endometriosis, which was discovered during the surgery but not disclosed to Carolyn.
“Once I found that out, and we compared notes, I told my doctor,” Larissa said. Even then, she was given medications for years instead of a referral to a gynecologist, which is what she really wanted.
Celebratory Meeting
The Strath women had a compelling story, and they decided to tell it through collaborative research. They were the two case subjects.
Their struggles—and the systemic dismissal of women’s pain— were distilled into a scientific poster that won the top prize in March at the annual meeting of the U.S. Association for the Study of Pain. The research is summarized in the March 2026 issue of The Journal of Pain.
The poster includes photos of an additional four University of Florida co-authors, labeled as “Outstanding Care Team.” Co-author Amira Quevedo, MD, from the UF College of Medicine’s Division of Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgery, performed surgery on Larissa in August of 2025.
That year, Quevedo was honored as a surgeon of excellence, and her division in UF Health became the world’s sixth Center of Excellence in Complex Endometriosis Care. Larissa confirms that excellence.
Larissa wants to continue sharing her family’s story to spark more conversations about women’s pain. She notes that her mother’s generation simply did not talk about it.
“Just talk about it. Make it a normal thing,” Larissa says. “My story is one of millions.”
Ounce of Flesh
Larissa’s personal approach to research gets even more personal.
A sample of Larissa’s tissue was collected during surgery. This tissue became the first sample analyzed in an on-going UF study of diet and pain control.
Larissa expects to publish fully peer-reviewed journal articles about these related problems: pain caused by fibroids and endometriosis, the neglect of such pain by multiple communities, and the effect of food choices on these diseases. Her mother Carolyn is a co-author of a peer-reviewed article that is currently under review.
To learn more about the subject, Larissa recommends the Endometriosis Foundation of America.
Endometriosis may affect ten percent of women, and most women will develop fibroids. It seems like common sense that we should talk about it.