Norman begins to feel like a friend, whether any part of her experience is relatable to the reader or not. You come for an exploration of women’s pain, but you stay for a very readable memoir-style tale of one young woman’s eventful life. Though Norman did work in a hospital for a time (and was able to access medical journals and see records that aided her personal research), this is not the writing of a doctor using impenetrable jargon to explore a niche condition. If you’re thinking this book sounds too medical for your taste, never fear. “If I, or any other woman whose gynecologic cancers or pathologies had gone undiagnosed, had just been sick in some other part of the body, in some other way, would it have been any different? Or would it not have mattered? Was the underlying preexisting condition being female? Does the congenital lack of a Y chromosome predispose a patient to worse outcomes regardless of what condition or disease they present with?” Ask Me About My Uterus contains its share of victories, but the problems it highlights are serious, numerous, and ongoing. I’ll warn you now, in case you haven’t surmised already: this is not a story that ends with a cure, with doctors being penalized for their failure to listen to women in pain, or with the resumption of Norman’s life and goals pre-symptoms. She takes the reader back through a childhood of abuse and perseverance, back further into a general history of female pain, and forward along the trajectory of her medical issues up to the date of publication.

What begins as a few days of skipping class in hopes of recovering from her strange sickness leads to hospital visits, a surgery, a recommendation that she leave school altogether, and growing concerns as her diagnosis and treatment does little to combat her chronic pain.

In the book, Norman opens her story on the day she first felt the pain that would come to define the rest of her life (so far). So when I heard about Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterusa few weeks ago, I ordered a copy immediately, wanting to better understand this insane phenomenon. Some of the details of her conversations with these doctors sounded absolutely unreal to me, and I became aware of this problem in the medical community: female patients with “female” complaints are treated dismissively. CW: child abuse, bulimia (affecting the narrator’s mother), medical mistreatment, chronic pain, sexism/misogynyĮarlier this year, I was talking to a friend who was very certain that she had endometriosis, who was having trouble getting her doctors to diagnose her condition and/or treat it effectively.

Ask Me About My Uterus by Abby Norman