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Hayley Sproull

Pop CultureNovember 23, 2018

‘Why wasn’t I told this when I was diagnosed?’ Hayley Sproull on living with PCOS

Hayley Sproull

Today, Cystic Sisters, a documentary about women living with PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) is released on TVNZ on Demand. Comedian, actor and Great Kiwi Bake Off host Hayley Sproull, the documentary’s presenter, looks back on her experience with the disease.

From as early as I can remember, I’ve always had a moustache. I used to get teased for it when I was a kid and I was super embarrassed. My mum took me to the Caci clinic when I was 11 for a version of lasering that was apparently okay for kids. But it always came back.

Then I got my period when I was 13 and it never settled into a pattern. It was super irregular my whole life – there would be three months in between, then seven months, then no sign of it for a year, then I’d get a couple and it’d be gone again. I spent a lot of my early adult life assuming I was pregnant. I’ve peed on a lot of sticks. A LOT of sticks. Too many sticks.

It wasn’t until I was about 20 that my flatmate Ana said, ‘Dude, I think you have PCOS’. I went and had an internal scan done and there they were – dozens of black circles covering my ovaries.

I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome – me and one tenth of all women. And you know what? It can be really shitty sometimes.

After being properly diagnosed, I wasn’t given many answers about why all these things were going wrong with my body. They just put me on the pill and that was it. Meanwhile I was getting fatter, and hairier, my skin was really bad and my hair was falling out.

I thought I was unlucky with that kind of thing but it was getting worse and worse. So I did what everyone having a rough time with their body does – I hit up Google. And what Dr Google told me was that all this shit that was overwhelming my body could all be linked to PCOS. And I was pretty pissed off.

Hayley Sproull (right, with Madeleine Sami) can be currently seen hosting The Great Kiwi Bake Off.

Why wasn’t I told this when I was diagnosed?

Why is the focus of a PCOS diagnosis only around fertility, and not the day to day shit that builds and builds and actually really messes with your life?

And then I was excited. There was the potential that I could learn more about PCOS and maybe that meant I could make it easier to live with. I set off on a journey to arm myself with as much information about PCOS as possible which involved a lot of Googling, a lot of appointments and a terrifying amount of people looking at my vagina. I was still entirely confused, but at least I was doing something which is better than doing nothing, while you’re cleaning wads of hair off the floor and bleaching your sideburns.

Cut to a year and a half ago, when I had just started making some work with TVNZ. I’d also met a whole lot of other friends with PCOS who were just as confused about it all as I was. A lot of the information out there is really daunting and heavy and that’s just not how I digest information.

I wanted to make something that felt fun, that was silly, that could help lighten the heavy burden of PCOS just a bit. I told some of the fine folk at TVNZ about this idea, they got on board with a resounding ‘Yes!’ and followed it up ‘Doesn’t so and so from accounts have that?’

The documentary is a 16 minute collection of interviews with actual experts and fellow PCOS sufferers (We call ourselves Cystic Sisters – and yes I realise that just ‘Cysters’ is far more clever, but it’s too late for that rebrand now, isn’t it?), and follows me around as I try to live my best cystic life. It’s very honest but hopefully very digestible. It isn’t going to give you a magic cure, but it might spark something in you that you want to go and investigate further with your doctor, your friends, or your vagina.

Hayley Sproull in her main gig as host of The Great Kiwi Bake Off.

My hope is that someone might watch it and think either ‘hey, I think that’s me’ or even ‘hey, I think that’s my friend’. The whole point of the work is simply to get talking more openly about this thing. On one hand PCOS isn’t that bad, and it’s manageable and it doesn’t have to run your life and you CAN have a baby, and so on and so forth. But, on the other hand women should be told about the increased risk of diabetes, miscarriage and depression that PCOS can cause. Can cause. Not will cause.

That’s the problem: That information should be told to women upon diagnosis, right? And it’s just not. It’s more like ‘let’s get that period going and get you on your way’. Seriously? That’s all the info you’re going to give me? Not getting a period is the best bit about PCOS! Now, if you could just help me with all the other shit, that’d be helpful.

While filming the doco, I was in a really good place with my PCOS. I was managing my symptoms well, I was feeling super on top of it and that made me feel empowered.

But right now, you guys, I’m really struggling. I’m on serious Struggle Street. I’ve gained 10kgs out of nowhere, my skin got so bad I had to go on Accutane, and it feels like I’ve lost half the hair on my head this year. Not to mention my sideburns have finally connected with my chin hairs.

Classic PCOS.

It’s swings and roundabouts with this beast and I’m not going to be embarrassed to talk about it anymore. It’s okay! PCOS doesn’t have to define you and there are a million ways to manage it, just like there are a million ways to remove a moustache. So check out my doco and if you can, come and talk to me or any other Cystic Sister out there. We can sip wine and rip each other’s wax strips off while we collectively share the weight of the PCOS load.

Cystic Sisters is available on TVNZ OnDemand from today. Watch it here.

All eyes on me!
All eyes on me!

Pop CultureNovember 22, 2018

House of Drag power rankings: Finding your heels on the catwalk

All eyes on me!
All eyes on me!

It’s costume chaos week on House of Drag – but who surfs the waves and who gets washed ashore? Sam Brooks power-ranks episode three of House of Drag.

After a shaky beginning, it seems that House of Drag is beginning to find its feet on the catwalk. Episode three is an altogether tighter ship, with clear narratives for the contestants throughout, and the right balance of heart and shade. And, considering that this week’s challenge revolves around shoving each other aside while looking for two dollar shop materials in order to build an outfit, that’s quite an achievement.

By far the best, and most illuminating, part of the episode was an early conversation between Trinity Ice and Hugo Grrrl about coming out and privilege in the trans community. The frankness with which both of these queens discuss their lives and experiences as trans people is incredibly refreshing and necessary. It brings things to the fore – namely, the privilege that trans men may have over trans women – that I hadn’t ever thought about, and I’d wager the same would be true of a lot of this show’s audience.

It’s a reminder that, at their finest, reality shows can be some of our most prescient, relevant and easily digestable social commentary. Sometimes they stumbles into it, and sometimes it’s intentional – as it is with House of Drag. If the show can keep threading in these conversations while not detracting from the competition, we’ll have a winner on our hands.

But without further ado, in classic Spinoff tradition (and we’ll be covering the show in this fashion throughout the season), I give you the power-rankings for episode three.

Queen of not reaching, Trinity Ice.

ELIMINATED: Trinity Ice

Trinity, you were not long for this competition. Your stonefaced antics will be missed. Your joke about ‘a homeless’ will not be missed. You definitely had more to give House of Drag, and it’s a shame that you were the casualty in another strategically chosen (and more on this later) elimination.

Serving tinsel realness, Leidy Lei.

6. Leidy Lei

Leidy Lei seems to be skating through the competition at this stage. Having barely scraped through after her stand-up comedy breakdown last week, even to her own surprise she avoided elimination after her chaos costume hewed closer to the Christmas tree on your office desk than greatness.

To quote: “I know what I’m wearing is garbage.”

If there’s an underdog narrative in play here, I can see Leidy Lei being a top three – but she’s got a lot of ground to cover, and after two consecutive episodes at the bottom of the pack, it’ll take a lot of work to make it there.

Christmas came early, Bunny Holiday.

5. Bunny Holiday

Bunny Holiday is getting the full villain edit here; there’s nary a cut to her (even outside of the Shade Cam – and I question the necessity of a Shade Cam when the contestants have no filters around being mean to each other to their faces anyway) where she’s not shading somebody else.

She’s going to be around until the very end, and despite this week’s aggressively decent elf look, I can sense her being a real contender when it comes to the performance challenges.

Meow kitty kat, Vulga Titz.

4. Vulga Titz

As my colleague Alex will attest, I cannot say, think or even conceive of the name ‘Vulga Titz’ without laughing in disbelief. Vulga Titz has invaded my idle thoughts, more as a name than as an actual queen, and I’m not upset about it.

Titz seems to be a contender for this show’s Miss Congeniality – or whatever legally okay version of Miss Congeniality this show will end up having – her to-camera interviews are earnest, and she seems to be throwing the least shade. In a competition where you can barely find the sunlight for all the shade blotting it out, that’s an asset in itself.

I have no idea what the pink thing is, Lola Blades.

3. Lola Blades

There’s a chance it played onscreen better than it did in person, but I was fairly won over by Lola Blade’s green fabric ensemble (the first and last time I’ll say that phrase, I’d wager). It looked like something that you could feasibly make in a small amount of time, and if someone showed up to Halloween wearing it, I wouldn’t be mad at them. Confused sure! But not mad.

I’m much less won over by Blades’ competitiveness – which has the steely, terrifying assuredness of a Housewife in Her Prime – and by her listing the titles she’s won over the past few years. Mostly because it’s a quality I recognise in myself that I don’t like very much. Reality shows: making us look at things we don’t like about ourselves since the late nineties, roughly.

The one thing going against Blades is that a key part of the competition’s elimination procedure relies on another contestant liking you enough not to send you home, and Blades doesn’t seem to be endearing herself to any of her fellow contestants at this stage. But hey, look how far not being liked took Omarosa!

Boys, my eyes are up here, Medulla Oblongata.

2. Medulla Oblongata

There’s little to be said about quiet, assured, classy competence. So I give you eyes on fluffy tits. Not to be mistaken for Vulga, Titz.

Bringing you Scout badge realness, Hugo Grrrl.

WINNER: Hugo Grrrl

The winner of this week’s episode, for his truly amazing plastic cup ensemble that could fill an entire whale’s stomach, is Hugo Grrrl. He’s also the winner of these power-rankings, for handling an altercation with Lola Blades in a truly classy way – by politely and simply asking ‘What do you think about your actions?’

Imagine if reality show contestants always handled conflict in this way! Imagine if people in real life handled conflict this way! We’d have solved climate change by now, or at least maybe toxic relationships.

Drinks are on Hugo Grrrl.

Lola’s explanation still isn’t enough to keep Hugo from putting her in the bottom two (if you need a refresher, the winning contestant gets to choose the bottom two, and the two hosts choose who goes home). It’s plausible that Hugo doesn’t hold a grudge against Lola for aggressively taking all the fabric, but also I still hold a grudge against a teacher who gave me a slightly lower mark than the one I deserved in high school. Humans are a rich tapestry, and grudges run deep. If I had a chance to send that teacher home, you can be sure that I’d goddamned do it.

Regardless, Hugo’s decision to pit Lola against Trinity in the bottom two backfired. Presumed serious contender Trinity went home, while Lola skated through – in a repeat of what happened last week, with Luna and Leidy Lei. It showcases the limitation of this method of elimination, because it’s a highly subjective, non-performance-based method. Unless somebody royally screws up, it’s still left up to hosts Kita and Anita to decide who is meant to go home. It’s not hugely satisfying to watch, it’s clearly unpleasant for the contestant who has to choose a bottom two, and it makes it nearly impossible to construct a contestant narrative arc, which is the backbone of any reality show. It’s why we keep tuning in.

Grudges and eliminations aside, Hugo is the one to beat. After their successful stand-up bit last week (I would’ve given them the win, easy) and this week’s challenge, Hugo is a threat in every way. They can perform, they can make, and they can resolve conflict in a satisfying way that still makes for good television.

You go, Hugo Grrrl, you go.