I’m Annette Leonard of https://www.annetteleonard.com find me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/theannetteleonard I'm listening to the podcast "The Retrievals." In which a fertility clinic at Yale had a nurse who was swapping out fentanyl for saline. The women who describe their pain go into great detail. They were systematically denied, told they had the maximum dose, suggested alternate stories to try make sense of the pain, and numerous other examples of how the doctors, nurses, spouses and the women themselves were conditioned out of believing their own experiences. It's so disheartening that in the 2020s were still doing to women what we were doing in the time of Hypocrites. When women were called "hysterical" due to free-floating uteruses. Thoroughly documented in the book "Unwell Women," how women's pain is radically under-acknowledged, untreated, dismissed. Does the explanation matter -- unless it's to help solve the problem? Why do we discredit women's pain. This becomes particularly difficult, as women, when we try to get our pain believed. Do I try to become cerebral, emotional, loud, demonstrative? Each method has it's consequences. The first time I had meningitis. I was experiencing new realities of pain. I didn't have a frame of reference for how much pain I was in. A doctor asked me about my pain on a scale of 1-10. While trying to avoid light, sound, touch, and trying not to vomit, I told him, "it's at least a nine." He said, "it's hard to believe you when you say that with a smile on your face." And my partner started to unpack the reasons I might be smiling. Not everyone has that kind of advocate who knows them that well. Thankfully, I got a spinal tap that led to me getting treatment -- but he could have given me a spinal tap and sent me home. Are you believed when you report your pain? Is your pain being addressed? Are you getting the pain-care you need?