Tiffany Cross has built a strong reputation for being candid about people and social issues on her MSNBC show The Cross Connection.

On Saturday’s episode, the television journalist decided to get candid about herself and her personal battle with fibroids in recent years.

Cross, 42, chose to tell her audience her story about her health struggle, explaining it was her hope it would help and inspire others going through the same health issues.

Tiffany Cross attends Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club 18th Anniversary at 40 / 40 Club on August 28, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

“For years I lived with intense, debilitating and shooting pain. I endured extremely heavy periods and despite my best working out effort, I had a constantly protruding stomach,” Cross said. “After hours in an emergency room one day convincing doctors that there was actually something wrong with me, I discovered that what I was dealing with was not so uncommon at all. Just like 25 million other women, I had fibroid tumors.”

Fibroid tumors, or uterine fibroids, are noncancerous growths of the uterus that tend to develop during childbearing age, according to Mayo Clinic.

Cross said she thought she could live with the tumors and that the pain would go away, until she witnessed how it was affecting her body.

What led Cross to finally take action was seeing her hair begin to fall out about two years ago. After documenting her hair loss with photos of her scalp over time, she suspected it was the fibroids causing the hair loss, especially since her own mother, who also suffered from fibroids, had similar hair loss issues.

After researching fibroids and retaining a Black female physician, Cross was presented with two options. One was to cut around the fibroids so she could retain the chance to become pregnant, later having another surgery after giving birth. The other option was to have a hysterectomy to remove her uterus, which would get rid of the fibroids and end her painful periods, but also end her ability to conceive a child

“I was already over 40, I wasn’t married and I had never met this baby I was supposed to have, so was I to live with pain, go bald and slice my body in half twice?” Cross continued. “I made the decision that was best for me and opted to have a full hysterectomy.”

All of this came just as Cross was auditioning her current gig, The Cross Connection. She disclosed that she was not paid for her network appearances as a political analyst. Without a steady income or health insurance, she looked to pay out of pocket.

“This type of surgery and the stay in the hospital was going to cost me tens of thousands of dollars that I just didn’t have, and that’s where Obamacare came in,” Cross said.

She revealed that she was able to get the surgery thanks to the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.

“I signed up and the day it went into effect was the same day I had my surgery,” Cross said. “And this, my friends, gave me an entirely new appreciation for how important covering pre-existing conditions are to so many of you out there.”

Cross stated that during her research she discovered that Black women are disproportionally more likely to have fibroids than white women.

Almost a quarter of Black women between the ages of 18 to 30 get fibroids, while only six percent of white women in the same age group get them, according to a report by the University of Michigan Health Department. For Black women, the percentage goes up to 60 percent after the age of 35.

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