'All it took to change my life was for my doctor to show me empathy, and I wish more health-care providers did the same.' andreagonram writes
Photo-Illustration: Josiah Whitfield; Photos: Getty I’ve struggled with severe period pain three days of every month for the past 18 years. That’s about 648 days when I’ve had cramps that felt like someone was stabbing my insides, heavy bleeding that ruined more pairs of underwear than I can count, and waves of nausea that prevented me from doing even the most basic tasks. Taking the maximum dose of painkillers alleviated my symptoms only briefly.
Sarah Michal Hamid, a full-spectrum doula and birth worker based in Honolulu, Hawaii, tells me that when she began menstruating, she would experience extremely painful periods that included nausea, bloating, and acute fatigue. Her father took her to her primary-care doctor, who told Hamid to take ibuprofen. When she said she already did, the doctor referred her to an OB-GYN. “They put me on the pill. No questions asked,” she says. “I was 13.
Not only did I feel like my previous doctors didn’t believe the extent of my symptoms, but I also felt they didn’t spend time trying to make sense of them. The current medical system — where doctors have to see a lot of patients in a short amount of time and must put a diagnostic code on a patient’s file in order to get paid by insurance companies — “is not the optimal situation to figure out a puzzle,” Spencer says.