Bindi Irwin dealt with “agonizing pain” for more than a decade as a result of her endometriosis. But it wasn’t until she had surgery to address her condition that she finally shared her journey with the world.

In a new appearance on Sarah Grynberg’s Life of Greatness podcast, Irwin says she hid her health struggles because the medical professionals she saw told her that she was imagining her pain.

“I was so scared to share my story,” recounts Irwin, who is a wildlife conservationist and the daughter of the late Crocodile Hunter star Steve Irwin.

“I had never talked about being unwell, because I thought it was all in my head,” she continues. “After a dozen doctors tell you you’re crazy, you start to believe them.”

Irwin rattles off some of the ways doctors explained her way her problems: She was told the problem was “IBS, or hormones or ‘It’s part of being a woman.'”

As her symptoms continued to worsen, she underwent a battery of scans and tests, but doctors always said that they couldn’t find anything wrong with her.

Read More: Bindi Irwin Cried ‘Happy Tears’ Over This Health Milestone

During this time, only her close family — her mother Terri, brother Robert and husband Chandler Powell — knew that she was suffering. Everyone else “must have thought I was just incredibly flaky,” Irwin says, because her fatigue, pain and illness frequently forced her to cancel plans.

It was that same close family group that kept pushing for her to seek answers, and not listen to the doctors who brushed her off.

But she admits it was hard to keeping fighting for a diagnosis, and her experience with medical professionals sometimes caused more harm than good.

“You turn to the medical industry looking for assistance and it can sometimes cause anxiety and depression,” Irwin says. “… This disease and other women’s health issues can be extremely isolating for people.”

When she first opened up about her surgery and her long battle with endometriosis, Irwin said her surgery team found “37 lesions, some very deep & difficult to remove, & a chocolate cyst.” She felt validated when her surgeon wondered how she’d been living through such excruciating pain.

“Those words just wiped me out because somebody finally validated 10-plus years of feeling so awful in one sentence,” she says now. “That meant so much to me.”

Her message to anyone in a similar position of struggling to find a solution with unhelpful doctors? “Never give up on yourself, because you will find answers,” Irwin says.