BFA Senior Exhibition
The process of being diagnosed with a chronic illness is notoriously difficult. It becomes even more difficult when the illness primarily affects people assigned female at birth.
This was my experience when I started having chronic light headed spells, fatigue, racing heart rate and many more symptoms as a teenager. I often got the same responses from doctors. "You are just anxious" "It's because you are a young woman" "That is normal for a woman" until eventually I injured myself passing out at work. Over a year following that incident and many other seemingly random blackouts, I was diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) and a Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO) in my heart. The male doctor told me the diagnosis after I woke up from being forced to pass out in a doctors office and I began to tear up. The doctor's response, "Are you going to cry about this now, too?"
Women's healthcare research and validity is drastically behind men's and it only gets worse when observing how this affects women of color and trans non-binary peoples.