She was mid-shoot, lights blazing, camera rolling, when her legs simply gave way. For Chloe, 24, from Manchester, it wasn’t the first time. And it wouldn’t be the last.
Chloe had been modelling since she was nineteen, picking up work for fashion brands and catalogue shoots across the north of England. But by the time she turned twenty-two, the collapses were becoming impossible to hide. “You can’t exactly tell a client you might pass out halfway through,” she says. “It got to the point where I couldn’t trust my own body.”
The culprit, eventually, was endometriosis. A condition where tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body, it affects roughly 1 in 10 women and people with a uterus in the UK. Around 1.5 million live with it here. Despite those numbers, the average diagnosis still takes a staggering eight years.
For Chloe, it took six. Six years of being told she had IBS, anxiety, or simply a “low pain threshold.” Six years of periods so severe she’d vomit, and fatigue so crushing she’d sleep for fourteen hours and still wake up exhausted.
The fainting, it turned out, was her body’s response to the intense pain signals firing during flare-ups. Her nervous system, essentially, was throwing in the towel.
She’s not alone in having her career derailed. Endometriosis UK estimates the condition costs the UK economy around £8.2 billion a year in lost work, healthcare costs, and reduced productivity. That’s not an abstract statistic; it’s people stepping back from jobs they love, relationships they’re struggling to maintain, and lives they’d planned differently.
Chloe now works part-time in social media management, something she can do from home on the bad days. She doesn’t regret leaving modelling, exactly. But she’s angry it was taken from her before she was ready to go.
“I just want people to know it’s not just bad periods. It changes everything.”
New NICE guidelines published last year pushed for faster referrals and better GP training, which is promising. But with NHS waiting lists stretched and diagnostic laparoscopy still the gold standard for confirmation, the question is whether the system can actually catch up with the need.
For the women waiting, years are still being lost.
