"Have You Considered Losing Weight?"

“Most women experience cramping, that’s not unusual”

You’re fourteen, clutching at your stomach. What feels like a knife making a spaghetti twist of your intestines threatens to make you vomit. The school nurse barely glances at you over a clipboard and reaches for a bottle of ibuprofen. “This should help.” You just want to lay down. She sends you back to class with a water bottle and an extra tampon. Your friends glance at you sympathetically right before you run for the bathroom to barf up your lunch and the two ibuprofen. It never helps anyways. The cramps last for the rest of the day.

“Losing weight might help with symptoms”

You’re a thirty-something with diabetes. You’ve spent the last ten years trying to manage your weight, and nothing works. At least five friends recommended this doctor to you, saying that he helped so much. You didn’t want to hope, but you did. Now, he’s saying what every other doctor has said your entire life. It’s useless to ask for a second opinion. He was your seventh opinion. The doctor leaves after talking for five minutes. You leave and have a salad for dinner while your family has burgers. It’s all you can do to put the kids to bed before crying yourself to sleep.

“Try dieting and low impact exercise"

You were an athlete in high school. Even at your absolute healthiest, you would get lightheaded during competitions. There were so many events you were forced to sit out of. You gained weight when you left for college, but didn’t everyone? It’s been impossible to get into shape because your heart threatens to jump out of your chest every time you do so much as a light jog. Your diet is so clean you can’t remember what sugar tastes like. All you want is a soda and fries.

“You probably just have a vitamin deficiency”

Not once have you been offered a hormone panel. Symptoms that seem entirely unrelated are lumped together into a blanket supplement that will maybe help you sleep better but you'll still wake up with fatigue that fogs your brain and leaves you wondering what in the world is wrong with you.

“You’re young. A lot of women see their symptoms abate after childbirth”

You’re in your early twenties, and living with undiagnosed but suspected endometriosis. It’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to conceive, let alone carry a pregnancy to term. The insurance won’t cover the diagnostic surgery. The insurance won’t cover the ablation that could help manage the excessive blood loss every month. Your provider recommends an iron supplement to keep you from developing anemia. At this rate, you don’t even bother to tell him about your fears that you’ll never be able to have kids. You have to be sent home from work a week later because you can’t get the cramping under control.

“I’m going to write you a prescription for birth control”

You are thirteen years old. You’ve had your period for a year, and you still don’t understand what’s happening. The doctor explains that it will help the pain, and that it’s perfectly safe. You trust her, and you trust your mom, who doesn’t know any more about it than you do, but wants to do what’s best for you. She ignores the warning sheet the size of a blanket in the pillbox. She doesn’t know that it hijacks your hormones, stripping your body of a natural cycle and forcing it into a chemical twilight zone. She doesn’t know how it will wreak havoc on your body when you try to stop taking it years down the road. All she knows is that she’s trying to help. You trust her, because you know she loves you.