A woman who survived a 20-pound ovarian cyst has a warning for others with mysterious symptoms like her own.

After Kenya Smith, 27, gave birth to her youngest daughter in March 2022, she noticed that her stomach wasn’t shrinking down to its pre-pregnancy size.

In fact, she seemed to be getting bigger.

Smith wasn’t sure what was happening to her body, but noted continued troubles with sleeping, eating and using the restroom.

“People constantly mistook me for being pregnant. I probably got asked over 50 times when I was due or if I was having a boy or a girl,” the mom from Orem, Utah told Southwest News Service.

“I finally stopped telling people that I wasn’t pregnant because it would make them feel so terrible because I did look pregnant, I would have thought that I was too,” Smith said explaining that her stomach grew even bigger than it did when she was nine months pregnant.

Smith went to five different specialists — an obstetrics doctor, a pelvic floor specialist, an allergist, a naturalist and a gastroenterologist — trying to get a diagnosis, but no one could determine what was happening to her body.

“I was pretty persistent even before it started to get bigger — I was at the doctor’s, googling everything and using social media to ask for help,” Smith said.

Then one day when Smith was scrolling through social media, she stumbled on a story of a woman with fibroids whose symptoms were similar to her own, including an enlarged stomach.

“I thought ‘oh my gosh, that looks like my stomach’. That initially made me think I don’t have time to wait for all these doctors to figure it out, I needed an ultrasound as soon as possible,” she said.

So Smith took it upon herself to schedule a CT scan and ultrasound. That’s when doctors discovered an enormous cyst growing on her right ovary.

Ovarian cysts are fluid-filled sacs that may develop with regular hormonal changes, and affect about 10% of women, according to the National Library of Medicine. Most cysts grow to the approximate size of a cherry but disappear on their own. However, some continue to develop and can lead to life-threatening complications.

In Smith’s case, she could barely sleep due to abdominal discomfort and breathing trouble. Her constipation had persisted for months and she felt so constantly bloated that she couldn’t eat properly.

“I was in so much pain and so miserable at the end. I was drinking smoothies for around three weeks, taking laxatives and was so malnourished,” Smith recounted. “I was literally was starving … I couldn’t eat anything because there was no more room in my abdomen for my stomach to grow.”

Her stomach continued to grow at an “alarming rate” up until her emergency surgery.

“It was really scary,” Smith admitted.

The mother had the surgery at the beginning of November. The cyst weighed 20 pounds and was about 12 inches in diameter.

“It was life-saving surgery. If it wasn’t treated it would have kept on growing and crushed my lungs, so I would have suffocated from the inside out,” Smith explained.

The physical pain caused by the cyst was incredibly intense, but Smith revealed that the mental impact was the most difficult part.

“When it started to crush my ribs it hurt so badly,” Smith said. “Physically it was hard, but mentally I think it was the hardest. I felt like my body was foreign and not my own.”

“I couldn’t get doctors to figure it out, that was the most frustrating part. They’d be like ‘ok, we’ll see you in a month’ after a check-up and I was like ‘let’s not wait a month, let’s figure this out now or tomorrow’.”

Fortunately, Smith took matters into her hands and “felt like a new person the day after.”

“The relief I felt was huge,” she shared.

The mom-of-three regularly posts TikTok videos about her ovarian cyst, with thousands of app users following her updates. She’s now using her platform to spread awareness and encourage women to advocate for themselves and their bodies.

“I feel like a lot of times women push through things because we really are so strong,” Smith said.

She explained that “women handle things well and deal with pain well” noting that females have to deal with menstrual cycles, cramps, babies and a plethora of other health things.

“We know our bodies better than anybody else — better than any doctor or professional,” Smith said. “We know when there’s a problem and we can’t let people gaslight us or make us feel like we’re being oversensitive because most of the time we’re not, because women are strong.”

“We deal with a lot of really hard things so when there’s something wrong we need to advocate to get the help we need.”