13 and 21. Two numbers forever seared into Heather McMaster's memory.
She was 13 years old the first time her body told her something was wrong. She got her period, and didn't stop spotting for a year.
That unusual occurrence would trigger a pursuit — for an answer.
"I wasn't ignoring my symptoms," says the 35-year-old. "I was advocating — I was going to doctors, I was going to specialists, and I was like, help me. What is going on?"
Her search was met with multiple tests, wide-ranging theories and several diagnoses.
A 21-Year Search: Living Undiagnosed with Endometriosis
"I've had four colonoscopies, endoscopies, heart monitors, heart ultrasounds — so many things," Heather recounts. Along the way, she was told it was irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), heartburn, anxiety, a bleeding disorder and just normal female discomfort.
"They never looked more into my pelvic area," she says. "So I just kept telling myself, this is normal, this is normal. I would suffer with it and learn how to adapt my life." At one point, she even wore a catheter for a week.
Years of Misdiagnoses — From IBS to Anxiety
For 21 years, Heather relentlessly sought a solution fighting through pain, distress and inconvenience almost daily — while the bleeding continued.
That elusive answer came in 2026.
A recreation therapist who works in long-term care with patients with dementia, Heather and her husband had been trying to start a family for nearly three years when a gynecologist gave her the same reassurance she'd heard for most of her adult life: don't worry about anything until you're 35.
So she stopped birth control.
Then an ultrasound found a cyst. A follow-up scan showed "kissing ovaries" — a sign of endometriosis so advanced the ovaries become bound to surrounding tissue.
Finally Diagnosed: Stage 4 Endometriosis and "Kissing Ovaries"
An Emergency Room Visit Changed Everything
She eventually ended up in the emergency room of a downtown hospital, where a physician recognized what months of other appointments had missed.
Heather ended up being referred to Dr. Ally Murji, Trillium Health Partners Chief of Women's and Children's Health.
She was diagnosed with stage 4 endometriosis — one of the most severe forms of a disease that affects roughly one in 10 women.
In Heather's case, the disease had been left to spread silently for more than two decades.
Meeting Dr. Ally Murji, Trillium Health Partners Chief of Women's and Children's Health
"This is not unheard of," says Dr. Murji. "What we hear all the time from women is that their symptoms are normalized. Care providers, in addition to family members, feel that pain with periods is normal — but it isn't normal — and unfortunately, this patient continued to suffer, and her endometriosis ended up progressing and becoming advanced and invading into other organs."
In the weeks before her scheduled surgery on April 1, 2026, Heather's body seemed to be racing the clock. She developed chronic hives, waking up at night to pack herself in ice.
She was rushed to the ER a second time after collapsing at work. Doctors found that her endometrioma (ovarian cyst) had likely ruptured.
Heather spent two months largely bed-bound, at times in a wheelchair, unable to work, relying on her husband to help her shower and get out of bed.
"The only thing that was keeping me going was I knew I had surgery," she says.
Heather and her husband had made a decision together before the surgery that whatever happened with their hopes of having a child, they were going to build a good life. "He was like, I need you here with me. We need to get your quality of life back."
Inside an Intense Surgery to Save Heather's Fertility and Quality of Life
The surgery was supposed to take three and a half hours. Dr. Murji and a highly specialized team of surgeons operated for more than seven hours.
"It's painstaking surgery with two surgical teams in this case — to really preserve some of her fertility, excise [remove] her disease and help her pain," says Dr. Murji, who had to call in general surgery colleagues for support. "That's a long time to be in the OR [operating room] for the patient and for the surgeons also."
What Surgeons Found: 11 Procedures in One Operation
What his team found was more extensive than any scan had shown: endometriomas measuring 11 centimetres on Heather's left ovary and 7 centimetres on her right, stage 4 endometriosis throughout her pelvis, and disease that had reached her diaphragm and bowel, which had to be surgically repaired.
In total, the surgical team performed 11 separate procedures in a single operation.
"I've never felt so validated," Heather says. "A surgeon who thinks your surgery is going to be three and a half hours, and it ends up being almost eight — and instead of just sewing me up, he was like, no, I'm going to do the best I can and get as much as I can. He saved my life."
Heather had gone in prepared to lose both ovaries. She came out having lost only one.
"He [Dr. Murji] was like, 'I'm going to give you quality of life back, but I'm going to try my best to save both ovaries,'" she remembers. "And he was able to save my right."
The complex procedure demanded specialized expertise and skill.
"It was much worse than we had expected," says Dr. Murji. "She also had endometriosis that invaded into her appendix, so her appendix looked completely abnormal. It was a hockey stick appearance, and so we had to take that out also."
What stays with Heather isn't just the surgical outcome — it's also how she was treated.
During her very first exam, she recounts how Dr. Murji noticed burn marks on her stomach from the heating pads she'd relied on for years for pain relief and asked her about them directly. "He was just so empathetic," she says.
Why Endometriosis Diagnosis Takes So Long — And How That's Changing
According to Dr. Murji, who specializes in minimally invasive gynecologic surgery, the median delay to diagnosis for patients who have endometriosis in Canada is over five years.
He is optimistic the future Shah Family Hospital for Women and Children — Ontario's first hospital dedicated to the specialized needs of women and children, and one of the flagship projects of Trillium Health Partners Foundation's Built for Us campaign — will help change that statistic.
"I'm hoping it will mean that we have streamlined pathways for diagnosis and treatment for these patients that extend far beyond the multidisciplinary surgery that we do. Whether for endometriosis, abnormal bleeding, menopause — if we can streamline the way in which patients are seen and triaged and managed in the community before they arrive to us — that helps increase patient access and shifts more of women's health care toward prevention, catching disease before it becomes this advanced," he says.
And as far as Heather's specific case is concerned, Dr. Murji says, "this is very common that women present so late because they're just dismissed, and then the endometriosis just invades and invades, and then it becomes quite extensive."
Life After Surgery: "I'm Just... Better"
Ask Heather how she's doing now, a few months out, and the answer comes without hesitation: amazing.
She's off the pain medication she lived on for years. The bathroom anxiety that once made her carry emergency supplies just to leave the house — built from two decades of never being able to trust her own body — has begun to loosen its grip. She can get her steps in. She can make plans without planning around pain first.
"It's night and day," she says. "I'm not who I was. I'm just... better."
The path to parenthood is still uncertain. But after years of being told a pregnancy might not be possible at all, she has something she didn't have before. "I just wanted the chance," she says.
"If another 13-year-old girl, or any young woman, thinks something's wrong — get other opinions," she says. "I just wish I knew more. Women's health is so important, and there's just... no one talks about it. It should be a conversation. People should have easy ways to find help."
Building a Better Future for Women's Health
That is the gap Trillium Health Partners Foundation is working to close through Built for Us — a once-in-a-generation, fundraising campaign to build Canada's largest hospital, Ontario's first hospital dedicated to women and children, and a redeveloped Gilgan Family Queensway Health Centre.
Trillium Health Partners already treats more inpatients and helps deliver more babies than any other hospital in Ontario — and over the next 20 years, no Ontario hospital will face greater demand for care, particularly among children, youth and seniors.
Ontario's First Hospital Dedicated to Women and Children
Heather recently got to see what that future looks like in person, when she toured the Trillium HealthWorks Experience Centre — a mock-site of the future Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital — and she was impressed.
"All the rooms are designed accessible. And the amount of different roles they're going to be hiring — recreation therapists, all these team members that are going to make a difference," she says. "They're really going in the right direction for women's health."
Faster, Streamlined Care Through the Built for Us Campaign
The new hospital will include a dedicated emergency department for women and children — specialized, faster-track care. It's being built, in large part, through the generosity of donors who are helping Trillium Health Partners reduce wait times and expand access to care, close to home.
"Even when I got diagnosed, I didn't know where to look," Heather says. "It would be amazing to just find real medical facts I can base my decisions on. I like how it's going in that direction."
How You Can Help Close the Gap in Women's Health Care
Heather and her family are already planning to lace up for Trillium Health Partners Foundation's annual Hazel McCallion Walk for Health, and she is looking at making her first gift.
She is also using her voice, publicly and repeatedly, to make sure the next 13-year-old girl with unexplained pain doesn't wait 21 years for someone to believe her.
"I just think, do little things where we can," she says. "Help where we can."
Make a Gift to Built for Us
Every donation to Trillium Health Partners Foundation's Built for Us campaign helps build a future where stories like Heather's don't take two decades to resolve — where the right specialist, the right technology, and the right answers are simply part of the care women and children in our community can expect from the start.
