Porsha Williams says she underwent an emergency partial hysterectomy in May 2026 after doctors found 21 uterine fibroids, including one the size of a cantaloupe.
In an exclusive CBS Mornings interview with Gayle King, the Real Housewives of Atlanta star described the speed of the diagnosis, the shock of waking up after surgery, and why she is speaking publicly now.
Porsha Williams Says She Underwent Emergency Partial Hysterectomy Due To Uterine Fibroids
“It all happened so fast. It really didn’t hit me until I woke up in the hospital bed,” Williams said.
The conversation, posted by CBS Mornings on September 18, 2026, is part of a broader day of candor: Williams also published a first-person essay in Glamour about the years of treatments she tried in order to keep her fertility, and the grief of losing that choice at 45.
A condition she first learned about while pregnant
Williams has lived with fibroids since her late 20s. She said she had barely heard of them until she was trying to have a child. A doctor found a fibroid during pregnancy-related exams. By four months, she said, the growth had outgrown the baby. She miscarried.
She later had a myomectomy, then welcomed her daughter, Pilar, in 2019 — a pregnancy she has long called her rainbow baby. Fibroids returned during that pregnancy as well. In her final month she was on bed rest while fibroids degenerated. She later underwent uterine fibroid embolization, a procedure meant to shrink fibroids while leaving the uterus in place, and believed the problem had been solved.
It had not.
Symptoms she blamed on perimenopause
At 45, after a divorce and while raising her daughter, Williams assumed she was finished having children. When heavy bleeding, long cycles, migraines, and fatigue returned, she attributed them to perimenopause.
The turning point was almost accidental. She accompanied a friend to a fertility appointment about egg freezing and asked the doctor to examine her, too.
“She started looking into, you know, doing the exam, and she went silent. And I looked at the screen, and all I could see was, like, black, and then I started seeing some circular lines. And I’m like, ‘Not again. Not again.’ They had come back,” Williams told King.
A fertility specialist was “in shock” at what a vaginal exam showed and sent her immediately for an MRI. Imaging found more than 15 large fibroids, plus endometriosis and a problem with the uterine lining. Surgery followed about two weeks later, in May 2026. In the operating room, doctors found 21 fibroids. The largest was compared to a cantaloupe. The procedure was a partial hysterectomy: her uterus was removed; her ovaries were left in place.
Williams has said she did not have a real choice. In Glamour, she wrote that the surgery saved her life and that her quality of life has improved “100 percent” — migraines, iron problems, bladder pressure, and other symptoms eased. She also wrote that she woke up thinking a part of her was gone, and that she had to grieve the possibility of more biological children.
Why she is talking now
Williams framed the interview as a warning against self-diagnosis.
“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 said. “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.”
That message lands on well-documented disparities. Uterine fibroids are extremely common. By age 50, more than 80 percent of Black women have ultrasound evidence of fibroids, compared with nearly 70 percent of white women. Black women tend to develop them earlier, with more numerous and larger growths and more severe symptoms. Hysterectomy has long been a frequent treatment, though patterns of who receives uterus-sparing procedures versus removal have shifted over time depending on the study and insurance population.
Williams has been public about miscarriage, infertility, and fibroids before. What she had kept private until this year was how far the disease progressed after she thought she was done treating it — and how quickly “maybe this is just perimenopause” became emergency surgery.
She is still working. Credits mentioned around the interview include The Traitors and Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip. The health story she is telling now is less about a franchise than about a condition many women, especially Black women, live with for years before anyone names it on a screen.
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