Throughout my life, I have suffered from chronic migraines and insomnia (which feed into each other), and a combination of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders as a result of the pain and the difficulty of dealing with doctors.
I was in one of my elementary school classes when I experienced the first migraine of my life. My head felt like it was going to split open, and I wanted to split it open to relieve the pain. I felt dizzy, and the bright lights of the school penetrated my brain to make the pain excruciating and unbearable. I tried to fight through it. I loved school, and I didn't want to leave. But the pain moved from my head into my chest and stomach, and I grew nauseated and finally was sent to the office when I ran to the trash can in a fit of violent gagging.
The doctor who examined me was a pediatrician. As far as I remember, he never asked me about the pain I felt—where it was located, how severe it was, anything that could have helped him recognize a migraine. Instead, he asked me whether I had started my period yet. I had not. When I told him so, his response was to tell me, "Well, when you become a woman, you'll experience a lot of pain. It's something you just have to get used to."
When I did go through puberty, I went to another doctor, still plagued by migraines and now unable to sleep. My migraines were forcing me to miss classes. In response to learning this, this new doctor (also male) accused me of faking pain to get out of school. Another doctor, consulted for a second opinion, said that he didn't see any evidence that the pain existed (the appointment we made coincided with a "good day"—when I did not have a headache) and that I might be imagining it.
In a haunting narrative by Joe Fassler, he writes about how doctors ignored his wife Rachel's pain, misdiagnosing and dismissing it as kidney stones when it was really an ovarian torsion. Even though she was crying out from the pain, doctors in the ER told her to wait, keep waiting, just wait a little longer. One doctor didn't perform the right exams when he did see Rachel, meaning she waited even more time than she would have if the correct exams had been performed.
When I read that article, all I could do was cry. Rachel's story is the story of so many women. It's my story. I went to multiple doctors, multiple emergency rooms, multiple counselors’ offices—and no one, no one, validated my pain. No one believed me, told me it was real, did any tests to figure out what could be causing it. I was dismissed for being a child who didn't know what pain was, for being female-bodied and therefore needing to get used to pain, for being in school and therefore clearly trying to fake it to get out of class. No one listened to my pain and told me it was real.
The treatment of patients matters. A review study by Linda LeResche looks at how gender matters in many areas of pain management, from prevalence of pain, or the willingness to report pain (1873), to the treatment of patients with pain once diagnosed (1875). As she acknowledges, "few studies have addressed how social factors and gender stereotypes might influence pain treatment" (1875). This is particularly alarming given that narratives like Fassler's show women being disregarded or dismissed when they report pain are everywhere.
When we dismiss women's pain, there can be serious consequences. It is not just a one-time dismissal; it can resonate for the rest of our lives. For me, those consequences were both psychological and physical. I still have anxiety and depression, and I still have to carefully monitor what I eat in order to make sure I get a certain number of calories a day, and although my (non)treatment is not the only reason I believe I suffer from these disorders, I do believe it is a major contributing factor.
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