Elissa Bassist - Hysterical

Y ou dont have a brain tumor, the first neurologist said.

You need new lenses, the first ophthalmologist said.

You may have a sinus infection, the owner of the bagel shop said, along with my physician.

It was late February, three months after the 2016 election, and my vision had blurred.

This would accelerate into a wire-hanger-in-the-brain headache, and the headache would segue into a relentless sore throat, which would segue again, into a persistent stomachache, and then again, into a herniated disc, among other symptomsso many that it got embarrassing. For the next two years I wouldnt have a life; Id have appointments: with a psychologist or a psychiatrist or ophthalmologists or general practitioners or neurologists or a psychopharmacologist or a radiologist or an allergist or an ear, nose, and throat specialist or a gastroenterologist or a nephrologist or an orthopedic hand surgeon or an occupational therapist or a rehabilitation spine specialist or a physical therapist or a massage therapist or an acupuncturist or an herbalist or an obsessive-compulsive disorder specialist.

Each week Id average two to three appointments and would take myself to each one alone, weighing a little less than I weighed before, and with a little less hair.

The diagnosis Id receive over and over, second to no diagnosis, was Nothing Is Wrong with You.

I had what millions of American women had: pain that didnt make sense to doctors, a body that didnt make sense to science, a psyche that didnt make sense to mankind in general.

To make sense of it, to not die from it, to recover, I had to reach the origins of these undiagnosed ailmentsand how they (and I) (and women) are misunderstood and mishandled. I had to backtrack to birth, to mine and to Eves.

What I figured out is best expressed by my mom, who within ten minutes into any conversation says in her Southern accent, Its a mans world.

The author and activist Caroline Criado Perez backs up my mom in Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men:

Starting with the theory of Man the Hunter, the chroniclers of the past have left little space for womens role in the evolution of humanity, whether cultural or biological. Instead, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence. And these silences are everywhere. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics. The stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future. They are all markeddisfiguredby a female-shaped absent presence.

These silences are everywhere. Many I experienced, but many I didnt notice. Sitting in cars, I suspected the seatbelt wasnt designed by a person with boobs. As a pedestrian, I noted that US traffic signs showed men walking (women were, obviously, at home, in triangle dresses, nursing their children or husbands). As I spent time in exam rooms as a sick woman, I stared at the medical wall art where female bodies were absent and male bodiesdepicted as the human body, the universal bodywere everywhere. When I scored a free trip to Israel and visited the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, I faced what women have faced for centuries: far less of the Wall than men (the Wall splits women from men, and the mens spot is two-thirds of the Wall, so women squish together to talk to G-d as the men roam). In El Salvador, which bans abortion, seventeen women known as Las 17 have been imprisoned and sentenced to thirty years minimum for having miscarriages or stillbirths. In March 2019 history was not made when NASA called off its first-ever all-female spacewalk due to wardrobe malfunction: there werent two spacesuits in smaller sizes (even in outer space theres a gender gap). Dogs are elected mayors (in Minnesota, in California, in Colorado, in Kentucky), while a quarter of human mayors in 2021 were women. Woman is defined in the New Oxford American Dictionary, Apples default dictionary:

(1) a woman got out of the car: lady, girl, female; matron; Scottish lass, lassie; informal chick, girlie, sister, dame, broad, gal; grrrl; literary maid, maiden, damsel; archaic wench, gentlewoman; (women) womenfolk.

(2) he found himself a new woman: girlfriend, sweetheart, partner, significant other, inamorata, lover, mistress; fiance; wife, spouse; informal missus, better half, (main) squeeze, babe, baby; dated lady friend, ladylove.

Man is defined:

(1) a handsome man: male, adult male, gentleman; informal guy, fellow, fella, joe, geezer, gent, bloke, chap, dude, hombre; (men) menfolk.

(2) all men are mortal: human being, human, person, mortal, individual, personage, soul.

(3) the evolution of man: the human race, the human species, Homo sapiens, humankind, humanity, human beings, humans, people, mankind.

(4) the men voted to go on strike: worker, workman, laborer, hand, blue-collar worker; staff.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was spoken by some guy, and the Word was wench. Because men wrote the Bible and the five love languages forging the American lexicon, and as women exit cars and are romantic placeholders for other women, men vote and men strike; men are born good-looking and men are alive and men have souls and men are advancing. Men are the norm, and men are the ideal. Anyone who doesnt fit is invisible or irrelevant and may be ignored or mocked or scorned or silenced or erased or defiled or killed. Or a combination, which is how a wench or lady or chick or girlfriend or wife or spouse or ladylove can die from silence.

In Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (2018), author Maya Dusenbery makes the connection: women are at least twice as likely to have chronic pain conditions that affect 100 million American adults, and these conditions are woefully undertreated and under-researched. Then there are medically unexplained symptoms, the latest label to be applied to allegedly hysterical symptoms, writes Dusenbery. She cites studies that show up to a third of patients in primary care and up to two-thirds in specialty clinics have them. And approximately 70 percent of [patients with medically unexplained symptoms] are women. Dusenbery also clarifies that some medically unexplained symptoms just havent been explained yet. This is because many millions of American women experience long delays and see multiple health care providers before getting correctly diagnosed, and can wait up to ten years to be diagnosed with endometriosis. (Endometriosis is thought to affect one in ten women, writes Perez in