Two women I know have been diagnosed with breast cancer in the last few months. They are both in their 50’s; they are also full time wives and mothers. Both of them had felt the lump in their breast several months earlier, ignored the pain believing it was nothing and sought help only when it had become impossible to put off any longer. When they reached out for help the lump was big enough to be stage three cancer. Hearing these stories brought back into memory three articles on women’s pain that I had read.
Joe Fassler’s account in the Atlantic, ‘How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously’ speaks about the sexism inherent in emergency treatment. The widely circulated New York Times piece, ‘The Gender Gap in Pain’ concluded that sex and gender play main roles in the diagnosing and treatment of pain. There was then the ‘Invisible Pain’ series that ran in Scroll.in that was on ‘forms of pain that are not understood well or are ignored or dismissed as minor health issues.’ There are several academic texts as well on the subject on women’s pain including the often citied ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ by Leslie Jamison and the University of Maryland paper ‘The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain.’
While systemic change is required to address the sexism in medicine, it is societal change that we need to ensure women take their pain seriously and report it. Years and years of living as mothers, wives or caregivers has ensured that women are more likely to place a chore over care for themselves, live with the pain because there is no time to attend to it, and ignore symptoms as there are always other things to attend to. Somehow, for women more than men, their bodies take last priority in the household scheme of things, and others begin to take notice only when the pain hinders the woman from performing her roles.
If the breast cancer stories are not hard hitting enough to make us see what we are doing wrong, let me give you another example. When the male of the house falls ill, the woman takes care of him. When the woman falls sick, who takes of her? In most cases, she takes care of herself, while the others continue with their lives. And therein lies the problem of being told time and again that one’s sickness is worse than the others, leading women to believe that their illness is less critical than the man’s (sometimes to do with employment status), and their pain whether physical or mental is not worth sharing or reporting.
Now how can we change this? By telling women that they value the same, their bodies are important, need care, and need listening to. By telling ourselves that we will ask, listen, and take it seriously when someone complains of pain. When someone complains of pain, to take it seriously enough and not dismiss it as something that will go away. When we are willing to acknowledge women’s pain, more of them will come forward to talk about it before it’s too late.
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
(The writer is a city-based activist,in-your-face feminist and a media glutton)