When Daneka Etchells took the stage as Lucius in Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe, it should have been a career high. Instead, it became the moment she knew work had become impossible. “I was using my walking stick pretty much all the time at that point and I could barely get up the stairs,” she says. “I felt so under the weather, so fatigued and in so much pain.” Soon afterwards, she was forced to take six months off.
Etchells was 12 when her period first arrived. Unlike many of her friends, hers were extremely heavy and she experienced excruciating pain. She was prescribed the pill, but even that didn’t make a difference. After multiple further GP trips with no real solution, her condition got so bad that she was left with a permanent physical disability.
“Actor Daneka Etchells was left permanently disabled after doctors failed to diagnose her endometriosis for 17 years.”
What Etchells was experiencing was endometriosis – a painful condition that affects one in 10 women – but by the time doctors found it, it had developed so much that it left her with permanent nerve damage. “It grew so vast and so wide and for so long, on nerves and ligaments that are attached to my legs,” she says. Although doctors removed it, she now lives with a permanent physical disability.
She told the BBC Access All podcast that what she’d experienced over the last 17 years was “medical gaslighting” – the term for a medical professional dismissing or invalidating health worries, causing patients to doubt their pain. Her own breakthrough came when she saw a female GP who put her on medication and referred her to a gynaecologist. On average it takes nine years to get a diagnosis. For Etchells, who is neurodivergent, it took 17. By then, the damage was already done.
Etchells says she felt “trapped” in her own body and “really immobile”, with periods so painful and heavy, and bladder and bowel problems so severe that she could barely function. Now, she is performing in a new stage adaptation of The Secret Garden at the Theatre Royal Bath, playing Martha the maid. The disabled-led production touches on the idea that one of the main characters, Colin, was himself medically gaslit. In the original classic, published 115 years ago, Colin is a disabled cousin hidden away. In this version, he advocates for himself and is finally listened to.
For Etchells, the role feels deeply personal – a reflection of her own long, painful wait to be heard.