Onscreen, Courtney Ford has mastered the art of power.
She has played prosecutors and mothers, antiheroes and villains. She has levitated objects with her mind on Legends of Tomorrow, embodied danger and desire on Dexter, and navigated family drama on Parenthood. On camera, she is composed, commanding, kinetic. Strength radiates from her.
Off camera, for nearly 25 years, she was fighting a battle that left her curled on a bathroom floor, whispering that she thought she might die.
“I knew something was wrong,” Ford says now. “But I didn’t know what, and I didn’t know why.”
What she didn’t know—what far too many women don’t know—was that she had endometriosis. Not mild. Not fleeting. But stage four, deep infiltrating endometriosis with bowel involvement. A disease that would eventually tether her colon to her psoas muscle. A disease that would make her feel, at times, “like I was 87 years old.”
This is the story of how she survived it—and why she refuses to be silent about it.
Courtney Ford (right) poses with fellow endo-warrior Corinne Foxx (left) and renowned endometriosis excision specialist Dr. Iris Kerin Orbuch (center).
Ford’s symptoms began at 17.
“I had a burst ovarian cyst when I was 17. I didn’t know what it was when it was happening. I thought it was appendicitis. I didn’t go to the doctor for it.”
The pain was blinding. Gastrointestinal issues followed. “I became lactose intolerant overnight. I became gluten intolerant.” Years later, she developed what she thought was sciatica. “My hips and my legs would ache so much that I couldn’t stand for a long time, but I also couldn’t sit for a long time. Long drives were painful. Even sleeping in bed, I had to have a special pillow under my hip. I felt like I was 87 years old.”
More cysts ruptured at 24. Then 29. Each time, the same agony. Each time, more confusion.
And when she did seek medical help, she was dismissed.
“I had a Beverly Hills OB-GYN laugh in my face and say, ‘Welcome to being a woman.’” No follow-up. No investigation. No suggestion of endometriosis. Just normalization of suffering.
It would take a decade—ten years of escalating symptoms and self-doubt—before she would receive a diagnosis.
“I am one of the people who took 10 years,” she says. “Being gaslit by doctors, but also gaslighting myself.”
Years later, after struggling with infertility and undergoing IVF, Ford experienced another rupture. This one dropped her to the tile.
“I was lying on the ground of my bathroom, screaming for my husband… because I thought I had to go to the hospital. Ultimately, I didn’t. Because when I had gone to doctors in the past, I had been dismissed.”
Instead, she lay there until sunrise.
Relief eventually came through family. Reconnecting with her half-sister changed everything. She had just undergone surgery for endometriosis.
“I said, ‘Endometriosis? What?’ And she told me all of her symptoms. They were the exact same symptoms I was experiencing.” For the first time, Ford had a word.
She underwent surgery, but an ablation procedure, not excision, which is now considered the gold standard. “It was stage three when I had the ablation,” she says. She became pregnant afterward and gave birth to her son naturally. For that, she remains grateful.
But ablation, she later learned, is “like trimming a weed instead of pulling it out from the root.” Six years later, the symptoms came back. “Endometriosis had returned with a vengeance.”
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At the time, Ford was filming in Vancouver, playing Nora Darhk, a woman with literal telekinetic power. “I was shooting a superhero show… being suspended from the ceiling and pretending to do telekinesis.”
The irony was brutal.
“I noticed I developed kind of a limp. I mean, I was hiding it. I don’t think anybody noticed. But the pain was so intense, I had to compartmentalize it.” She couldn’t take strong painkillers; she had lines to memorize. Stunts to execute. A character to inhabit.
“So I was just kind of shutting it out. And then when I was at home, I would just lie down with a heating pad until it burned.”
Her son was six or seven. She couldn’t play with him. “It was horrible,” she says.
She tried everything—acupuncture, cupping, nutritional supplements. “I was taking, like, 10 vitamins a day in a smoothie.” Breathwork. Emotional release. Nothing worked. “I thought I had the C word,” she admits. “I was so afraid.”
And because endometriosis often doesn’t appear on scans, fear thrives in the blank spaces.
“I just didn’t know what it was.”
In desperation, Ford reached out to her former Parenthood co-star Mae Whitman, who had also spoken publicly about endometriosis. “I wrote this long, rambling, oversharing email,” Ford says. “I was like, I’m afraid I’m gonna die.”
Whitman’s response was immediate and emphatic: “You have to talk to my doctor… I’m obsessed with her.”
Ford laughs softly at the memory. “I had never heard anyone be obsessed with their doctor.”
That doctor was Dr. Iris Kerin Orbuch, a specialist in excision surgery. During the pelvic exam, Dr. Kerin Orbuch could physically feel that Ford’s organs were pulling left. She suspected not just endometriosis, but adenomyosis.
Ford struggled to absorb the flood of information. “I couldn’t process everything that she was saying.”
But surgery confirmed the severity: “Stage four deep infiltrating endometriosis with bowel involvement. Fibrotic obliteration of the appendix. Bilateral ureter endo.”
Later, a third surgery would confirm adenomyosis and pelvic congestion syndrome. Part of her colon was adhered to her psoas muscle. “It was such a relief just to know that it wasn’t all in my head,” she says. “That I wasn’t crazy or dramatic—or honestly lazy.”
Lazy.
“I was beating myself up thinking I was lazy, not being able to play with my son. But I couldn’t move. My colon was adhered to my psoas.”
Eventually, she underwent a hysterectomy.
“I was scared. The idea of losing my uterus… even though I wasn’t planning to have another child, the idea of that was just so shocking.”
Today, she has no regrets.
The memory that undoes her is not the diagnosis. Not the surgical photos. It’s a moment before anesthesia.
“When you’re getting put under for surgery, they ask you to count down from 10. And I was so afraid. I was shaking all over. I couldn’t count down from 10.”
Instead, she reached out blindly and grabbed her surgeon’s hand.
“I just said, ‘I love you.’”
The doctor squeezed back.
“She said, ‘I’ve got you.’ And then—boom—I went under.”
Ford tears up recounting it. “Dr. Kerin Orbuch saved my life,” she says simply.
Courtney Ford and Dr. Iris Kerin Orbuch at the 2nd Annual Gurus Awards, where Ford presented Dr. Kerin Orbuch with the Gurus Magazine Hope & Healing Award.
Because with bowel involvement, surgical precision is everything. “If it were somebody with less skill, I could be walking around with a colostomy bag.”
Instead, today, she dances in her kitchen.
“It’s because of her that I can dance in the kitchen with my son.”
Chronic illness collides violently with Hollywood’s expectations. “At the time, I’m playing this character with this incredible power,” Ford says. “And inside, I felt powerless.”
She describes what she calls “pain fog.”
“I was in so much constant pain, I could barely think. So it was like I was in a fog.”
She was living a professional dream—on a beloved show, in a beautiful city. “And I was having such a hard time being present for it, because I had to compartmentalize my pain.”
The disconnect was surreal: telekinesis onscreen, immobility at home.
“Walking around trying to be a superhero while my psoas is attached to my colon,” she says, incredulous even now. “What the—?”
But she soldiered on. Because that’s what women are trained to do.
“We have been expected to carry on. And we do.”
Ford’s voice sharpens when she talks about the broader system. “It’s very upsetting that in this country, women’s pain is just normalized.”
She returns to that first doctor who laughed. “He was not concerned at all. He didn’t ask for follow-up tests. He didn’t even suggest the word to me.”
And the problem extends beyond exam rooms.
“There are so many women who are telling their doctors, telling their spouses… I am in so much pain. And it’s bizarre that even though their loved one sees them in pain and feels sympathetic—that’s where it stops.”
Sympathy without investigation. Empathy without urgency.
“Endometriosis isn’t cramps,” she says firmly. “It’s a full-body, all-day, every-day, exhausting pain.”
She points out that some research suggests women may delay seeking care for heart attacks because the pain can feel comparable to severe menstrual pain.
“That’s how crazy it is,” she says. “Just because we can bear it doesn’t mean we have to.”
Today, Ford uses her platform unapologetically. She connects with women who see themselves in her story—the bathroom floors, the heating pads, the doubt. “I feel incredibly passionate about women being able to advocate for themselves,” she says.
She wants women to stop shrinking in exam rooms. To stop worrying about being “too much.”
“To not feel like you’re bothering anyone by advocating for yourself,” she urges. “Especially with something like endometriosis. It just keeps spreading. It just keeps getting worse.”
She once hoped her disease would resolve with clean eating and vitamins.
“It didn’t. And it got stage four deep infiltrating endometriosis with bowel involvement.”
Her message is both warning and balm: keep going. Keep asking. “You go to enough doctors,” she says. “Of course, you learn to gaslight yourself.”
But somewhere, there is a doctor who will play detective. Who will connect the dots. Who will take your hand.
“When you have a doctor like her,” she says, voice breaking again, “you feel like you found an angel.”
In the end, Courtney Ford’s story is not about fragility. It is about ferocity. It is about a woman who performed wire stunts while her organs were fusing together. A mother who berated herself for laziness when she was, in fact, surviving an invisible war. An actress who once whispered “I love you” in terror before surgery—and woke up to a second life.
“I’ve got you,” her surgeon told her.
Now, Ford is saying it to other women.
You are not dramatic. You are not weak. You are not crazy.
And you do not have to endure.
Photographer: Josh Fogel
Assistants: Victor Rodriquez and Andrew Petrich
Beauty Director: Joel Sebastian
Beauty Editor: Bong Buan
Produced by: Kate Morgan —Morgan Publicity
Location: Elsewhere Hotel
Special thank you to Shane Orser and the team from Elsewhere Topanga/Petit Ermitage
Post-production: Lidiia Berezhna
Layout: Jenn Salmorin
Publisher: Derek Warburton
