I’ve been listening to a podcast called The Retrievals by Serial Productions. I recommend finding it, but not because it has a thing to do with fibromyalgia. In short, the story is about a nurse in a fertility clinic who was replacing fentanyl with saline solution. Women who were coming to the clinic for an egg retrieval procedure were given saline instead of a pain killer med. I can’t imagine what these women went through during the procedure, but the words “screaming in pain” came up more often than not.

While the story is about the patients who went through this, the addict who caused the pain, and the clinic that didn’t catch it for a couple years, there’s an underlying story that the podcast shines light on: How women in pain are treated by medical professionals.

There’s a terrifying hierarchy of how pain is addressed in patients. I don’t have the statistics and honestly I’m too tired to dig them out. I know that non-white people are not treated the same as white people. I have seen those statistics working in the healthcare industry. At the same time, women’s pain, whether white or not, is not treated the same as a white male’s pain. The patients in the podcast were offered hand-holding and treated as if they were hysterical. When it came to light what had happened, the bottom line in the letter of apology from the clinic was: no harm done. There was no acknowledgement of the women who gave up on having a child because of the pain, no acknowledgement of the mental health consequences of being subjected to that kind of pain.

On a personal level, I know a woman who lost her leg after a knee replacement surgery when her pain was ignored too long. She was treated as drug-seeking or simply attention-seeking until it was too late. I recently had a colonoscopy with biopsies where I was not completely put to sleep and had serious pain during the procedure. When I complained about the pain, I was told, “We’re almost done” and all but patted on the head.

I have seen how my father, a dignified professional white man, has gone through the medical system for his chronic pain. While I am 100% convinced he has dealt with fibromyalgia (along with other problems) he has never been “pigeonholed” into a diagnosis that has no cure. He has been offered and encouraged to take various pain treatment throughout the years. There is a strong focus on his comfort.

I know I have a different approach to doctors than my dad, but only because I have been pigeonholed into that hopeless diagnosis. It doesn’t surprise me when I’m sent home with a “let’s just see how it goes” instead of pain medication (which I don’t want anyway). I have had to create a system to protect myself and learn to advocate for attention when something is different from the fibromyalgia pain, so I don’t lose a leg because no one listens to me.

Bottom line: women are treated differently for pain management. Fibromyalgia diagnosis and management is an indication of that.