Why is women’s pain routinely ignored in our medical care system? | Opinion

Last month, I went to the emergency room for the first time since my mom birthed me. Other than routine check-ups or an ear infection, I’ve been healthy my entire life. So, you can imagine my surprise when I sat down to watch TV after dinner one Friday night around 7 p.m. and began to feel what I assumed was stomach pain. I thought maybe this is gas due to not eating enough today so I drank some ginger tea and laid down. After an hour, I felt the urge to throw up. Not like a regular nausea urge typical of when I menstruate, but a very intense push toward the toilet. Soon after, I threw up my entire dinner. All the macaroni and cheese, broccoli, and chicken I ate was now in my toilet as I lay sweating in a ball on my floor. Did I give myself food poisoning? Nope! I had eaten the same thing all week so how was I sick now, I thought. After another hour of agonizing stomach pain, I made my way to the ER at a local Lexington hospital.

While waiting to be seen, I threw up another couple of times. My mind wandered to the critically acclaimed HBO comedy, “Silicon Valley.” I had started watching wondering if this would feel like the main character’s interactions with the medical industry. Regularly seen for his bouts of stress-induced panic attacks, nausea, and night sweats, the main character and founder of the fictional start-up Pied Piper, Richard keeps going to the same doctor even though he gets no help. Instead of help, the doctor makes fun of Richard. He jokes that Richard is not man enough for the intense world of tech. The show’s reoccurring storyline about Richard’s relationship with his doctor felt a lot like the medical stories (or maybe nightmare is more accurate) of the women I know.

For example, after sweating through multiple shirts one night in Season 2, Richard goes to see his doctor again. The doctor spends the entire visit joking that Richard’s night sweats could become bed-wetting and how terrible of a man he must be for bed-wetting. I wondered how much of this joke only applied to men because women go to doctors that downplay their symptoms, make fun of them, or otherwise ignore their requests for help all the time.

When I finally got seen at the ER, I was asked the dreaded question that all women get asked any time they have a medical issue as unrelated as hiccups are to headaches — are you pregnant? And the question is always followed up with — are you sure? As if I magically would remember getting impregnated the night before. Either way, they still do a blood test to check and then they decide to treat you based on your desire or proximity to pregnancy. I found out, like as many as 70% of women do, that my pain was due to a uterine fibroid. The remarkable thing was not even that there is a fibroid since most women experience them within their reproductive years, but that it was baseball size! Despite going for my annual wellness checkup, how had a fibroid — a mass of smooth tissue — the size of a baseball grown undetected for possibly as long as five years?

Perhaps we could call it medical negligence since Black women are statistically more likely to experience misdiagnoses and maternal death due to medical racism, or that it grew astronomically since my last appointment in July of this year. But more likely, it has been hanging out with me for a while growing unacknowledged because the symptoms for fibroids (and honestly every medical issue that women have) is the same as menstruation. Speak to any woman you know about her typical symptoms like menstrual cramps (as painful as a heart attack!), blood loss, migraines, bloating, nausea, breast pain, and fatigue and she can tell you all the self-created strategies she has built around her monthly experience. You might also hear about supposedly less frequent symptoms like diarrhea, constipation, itchiness, breast pain, swelling of the lower extremities and abdomen, heightened sense of smell or altered taste buds. She might even tell you — like I always do when someone asks me if I mentioned my symptoms to my doctor — that her doctor has no idea why she experiences these issues but did not even bother to write them down in her chart.

This means that not only was my own fibroid growing stealthily, covered by all my other symptoms during menstruation, but that most women don’t know they have any issues at all until their pain becomes so extreme that they go to the ER or nearly die due to blood loss, like my dear friend almost did earlier this year. And even after I was diagnosed and was steered to see an OBGYN for follow up, I called nearly every doctor in town and couldn’t be seen before November!

While Silicon Valley’s Richard could be seen for every night sweat or feeling of nausea, women in Lexington and I’m sure many other places in Kentucky and beyond cannot see a doctor for lifesaving (but perhaps non-emergency) healthcare for months. Yes, the pandemic has made medical care that much more difficult to receive but is there not a problem when our own town cannot seem to take care of the women that live and work here? While men’s medical options can become the punchline for a comedic show, women’s healthcare is on the brink of collapse. Somehow every woman I know in Lexington or around the country has a medical story just like mine, so what are we doing about it? It feels like we are all just laughing at how ridiculous it is and praying we get the help we need before it is too late.

Aria Halliday is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, African American and Africana Studies and International Film Studies at the University of Kentucky and the author of “Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture.”