It Was Never “Just Cramps”
The Cost of Simple Answers in Medicine, and How We All Can Do Better
Nov. 1, 2026
By Megan Fordon, LMSW
I was twenty-two when I was told getting an IUD would be simple. Take two Motrin, then a deep breath, and a slight pinch.
It was not a slight pinch. It was the worst pain I had ever felt. I screamed, tears streaming down my face. The doctor gave me a half-confused, half-pitying look as she walked out of the room, reassuring me that “everything would be okay.”
As if I were possessed, I jumped off the exam table and ran out of the room. I couldn’t sit still. The pain was unbearable. Desperate, I looked for somewhere to run, someone to tell. But there was nowhere to go, and the hallway was empty. So, as my vision started to blur, I returned to my room, sank back into a chair, and sobbed.
When I realized nobody was coming to check on me, I put on the pad they’d given me and got dressed. I wobbled out of the clinic, thinking it must be me. I must have a low pain tolerance. Or maybe I’m overly sensitive? Surely someone would have mentioned the horrible pain of an IUD insertion if others experienced it as well.
It had to be me...
So I listened to the doctors and waited for the pain and cramping to subside. First, it was a week. Then it was a month. Then it was three months.
“The ultrasound showed it was in place,” they’d tell me. “Your symptoms are from something else. Give it some time, it’ll get better.”
But a year went by, and it didn’t. And though I was convinced I’d regret it, I had the IUD removed.
The relief was instant.
Sixteen Years of “Normal”
I was eleven when I got my first period. We’d just had our first health class that week in school, so thankfully, I actually knew what was happening. However, it didn’t prevent the onslaught of shame, horror, and dread that came alongside the realization that I’d “become a woman.”
In an attempt to escape the embarrassment and hold onto my youth for as long as I could, I kept my period a secret for a year. Looking back, it’s hard to comprehend how an eleven-year-old could do that, but for me, it felt like survival.
It wasn’t until I was twelve that I finally told someone how painful my periods were. And even then, I’m sure I played it down, afraid I was “making a big deal out of nothing.” Motrin and heating pads became my best friends during that time, offering me a glimpse of relief.
But by fourteen, the pain wasn’t only around my periods anymore. I started to experience random stabbing pains in my stomach that would come out of nowhere and refuse to leave until I lay flat on the floor in the middle of class. At fifteen, I had an endoscopy performed due to suspicions of celiac disease, given my family history. Everything came back normal, celiac was ruled out, and we never talked about it again.
That same year, my mom took me to a gynecologist. I thought my pain was finally going to be taken seriously. But the doctor only talked to me for about a minute before sending me home with birth control in hand and a budding realization:
This was normal. My pain was an overreaction. Nobody likes a whiner. Shut up and take your medicine.
I didn’t question it for a long time. Not when I was growing large cysts that tripled the size of my ovaries and burst, despite being on birth control, nor when chronic inflammation took my appendix at nineteen.
It wasn’t until my early twenties, after numerous poor experiences with birth control (including the IUD), that I stopped hormones altogether. Though my health declined severely in the years that followed (POTS, MCAS, etc.), stopping also led to a discovery. Without hormones quieting my symptoms, I could finally see what they had been trying to show me all along. Each symptom would quickly emerge, then slowly dissipate with the shifting hormones throughout my cycle. And the longer I went without birth control, the worse each symptom became, and the fewer “good days” I had each month. It was a classic case of endometriosis.
Last month, at twenty-seven, my suspicions were confirmed through laparoscopic excision surgery.
After sixteen years of pain, I was finally diagnosed with endometriosis.
There have been many different emotions in the month since surgery. Relief that I was fucking right. Anger that I had to suffer so long.
Sometimes it becomes too much to sit with these emotions. Just like with the IUD insertion, a part of me gets really uncomfortable sitting in pain, which I guess makes sense, right?
It's in those moments, the endless stream of questions appear. The problem-solver in me over-analyzes issues in a desperate attempt to evade my own pain. It may not be what’s best for me, but nonetheless, it’s important to look for solutions.
It’s important to me that girls and women, both now and in generations to come, are heard. It’s important to me, as a therapist, to understand this problem at its core, so I can actually help the girls and women I talk to every single day. And it’s important to me that no one else endures sixteen years of pain because they were told it's "normal."
So, for the past month, I’ve been exploring these questions:
How do we stop this from affecting future generations?
How do we teach others to take women’s pain seriously?
How do we show girls to listen to their bodies, not what others say?
Well, I like to think of finding a good solution like eradicating weeds from your lawn. You’ve got to grab it by the roots, or it’s just going to sprout up again.
The Roots
When I look back in time to the early glimpses of dismissing my own pain, a kaleidoscope of memories unfolds in front of me.
The three-year-old with a dislocated shoulder, told to “Stop crying, you big baby!”
The four-year-old whose older brothers laughed at her after peeing the bed one night when she threw up.
The five-year-old whose pleas for attention were overshadowed by the needs of her younger brother.
I learned and observed, observed and learned. That’s what kids do. They absorb everything they can from their environment. They learn the best time to tell mom about a bad grade, and who to ask to take them for ice cream.
Some of us who grow up with a bit more chaos at home take it a bit further. We get more vigilant. We can identify the way mom walks when she’s extra mad, or the way dad pulls his car into the driveway after a bad day at work.
That kind of learning is why, by seven years old, I was playing off tears as laughter after getting kicked in the head at camp. And at eight, I swallowed my vomit on the carpool ride home from soccer because I thought I could make it without having to tell anyone.
And guess what? They were all reinforced in their own way. Everyone at camp laughed along with me after I got kicked in the head. But the girls in the car screamed when I couldn’t swallow my vomit any longer.
So by ten, I had picked up on some very important life rules:
People like a good little girl. I need to be that good little girl.
How to Be a Good Little Girl
Do not have any issues, problems, bad qualities, or unpleasant things about you.
If you cannot complete step one, shove the aforementioned qualities as deep down as you can, and don’t let anyone see them.
Be pleasant. Be good. Be positive. Be what people want you to be.
Receive lots of rewards, compliments, and reinforcements:
“Wow, you’ve really raised such a thoughtful, selfless little girl!”
“You were such a good baby. Never cried! Not even once!”
“She’s so sweet taking care of that babydoll.”
“We really appreciate it when you take care of your siblings, and the laundry, and dishes.”
“Wow, all A’s again! You must have worked so hard.”
I can only speak to the rules I learned as a girl. I grew up with three brothers, and they didn’t seem to follow the same ones. They were loud, they fought back, and they didn’t hide in the shadows as much as I did.
As a therapist now, I hear it over and over again with my female clients. I fear they took on the same “good girl” persona as me. They share their burnout and exhaustion from carrying the household weight, but never mention it to their spouse. They don’t cry until they’re screaming. They have to be the perfect parent. Perfect mom. They’re still confined by the impossible expectations they took on to be that “good little girl.” So, just like me, they don’t speak up when a doctor dismisses their pain. They take it, internalize it, and blame themselves.
The Words I Didn’t Have
When I think back to that exam table at twenty-two, I wish I’d been able to say:
This is hurting me. Take it out right now. I don’t care if it looks like it’s in place on the ultrasound. I need a different option.
But I couldn’t. I don’t think I would have even been able to come up with those words.
In order to come up with those words, someone would have had to teach me to listen to my body. That I was good, even when I was mad. That my pain wasn’t a burden. That I was allowed to be confident, intelligent, and strong. It was okay if I took up space, or had the spotlight. I needed someone to believe in me, so I could have believed myself in that moment.
That’s the wiring I was handed, just like the many generations of women before me. But don’t mistake me for hopeless. I do believe I can change that story, even if it’s one of the hardest challenges I’ll face, and it doesn’t have to be the story for the generations of women to come.
I know how difficult it is to undo the wiring that kept us safe for so long. But hardship wouldn’t deter me from showing up for my younger self in those painful moments, or for any child, for that matter. So why should it stop me from showing up for myself now?
And maybe we don’t have to completely undo the wiring.
Maybe we just have to learn the mechanics, so we can update the system.
The Math Behind Dismissal
In my work as a therapist, I’ve taken a liking to Parts Work. This therapeutic modality sees a person’s mind not just as one state of being, but as a constellation of different parts. For instance, the you that talks to your boss at work probably looks, feels, and sounds a lot different than the you talking to your best friend.
The main idea with parts work is that every part, even the ones we aren’t fond of, has good intentions for us. Yes, this includes the part of us that got sloppy drunk last Tuesday night and drunk dialed her ex. And yes, that includes the onslaught of debilitating shame that followed the next day.
The part of us that binge drinks wants to have a good time. It’s not thinking about the consequences. It needs an escape, and it’s worried about what will happen to us if we don’t get a reprieve.
The part of us that feels ashamed the next day is so critical because it doesn’t want us to make that mistake again. It’s trying to tell us, “Hey! Don’t drink like that. You call your ex every time and get hurt all over again.” It’s not concerned about what was happening the day before, or why we needed to escape in the first place. It’s a simple, child-like solution:
A + B = hurt. Don’t put A + B together.
But if we don’t understand these things, or understand ourselves for that matter, we’ll just listen to the shame and believe the criticism, never knowing what it’s really trying to tell us. We’ll beat ourselves into the ground, so that the next time we have a bad week, we hear that vodka bottle calling and pick it up, without realizing the bottle is what got us feeling that way in the first place.
Now take that same logic and apply it to everything we’ve been talking about.
The parent who tells a three-year-old to “stop crying” is doing the same simple math:
Crying child + their own old shame about crying = unbearable.
Make it stop.
That part of them isn’t thinking, “Oh my god, what if they’re hurt?” It may not even allow the parent to consider that in the moment. Its sole purpose is to protect the parent from their own pain: the kid inside them who was once shamed for their own tears. And so the parent ends up hurting their child the same way they were hurt. When a parent doesn’t heal, or doesn’t even know there is something to heal, they’ll keep passing those burdens down to future generations.
The clinician who says “there’s nothing here” is doing it, too. Often, I think, that part is protecting them from helplessness: the unbearable feeling of sitting across from someone in pain and not knowing how to fix it. Dismissal makes that feeling go away. Add what they were taught about women in pain, a rushed schedule, and a culture that has long treated women’s pain as exaggerated, and “it’s just a bad period” starts to sound like the safest answer in the room.
I think the same is true for a lot of social harm. Stereotypes, microaggressions, and discrimination are all learned. And they wouldn’t last in people if they weren’t protecting them in some way.
Take my “good little girl” persona, for example. She learned to swallow her pain and not talk back, just like the generations of women who came before her. But because she couldn’t share her feelings, she got really annoyed with those who did. The “whiners,” the “attention-seekers,” the “bitches.” As long as she was shoving down her own pain out of fear that it wouldn’t be heard, she kept judging others for being loud.
That doesn’t excuse the harm these beliefs cause. But we all need to understand where they come from if we want to see lasting change. If no one gets curious, we’ll keep running the same math over and over again, and the next generation will learn it, too.
The Catalyst
I don’t have the whole solution. But I have some ideas about where to start.
We change how we talk about women’s pain, beginning with girls. “You’re fine” and “Don’t be dramatic” teach a child to distrust her body. “That sounds really painful. Tell me more” teaches her it’s worth listening to.
To the Medical Community: Get Curious
As for the medical community, I encourage clinicians to get much more curious.
One of my favorite moments in the TV series House comes in the third episode of the first season, when the team is debating whether a patient has one condition or two. Someone offers up Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest answer is usually the best one, as a reason it’s likely just one condition. House pushes back with a joke about a stork delivering a baby. It certainly is simpler to believe one stork delivered the baby than to believe two people had to make it. But does that make it the best answer?
House believes, much like I do, that the simplest answer isn’t always the best answer. As he puts it, the simplest explanation is almost always that “somebody screwed up.”
When a patient keeps coming back to you in pain, maybe there are questions worth exploring for yourself. Maybe “it’s just menstrual cramps” wasn’t enough. What’s keeping you from accepting that? What are you concerned will happen if you spend a little more time with this case and consider something outside of the simplest explanation?
If you’re a clinician who has received poor reviews, or you keep hearing that patients don’t feel heard, start by getting curious about why. A few questions to sit with:
When a patient’s pain doesn’t match their test results, what do I do next?
What was I taught about women in pain, and who taught me?
If I’m honest, what makes “it’s just cramps” the easiest answer to give?
What would it cost me to say, “I don’t know yet, but I’m going to keep looking”?
To the Rest of Us: The After-Appointment Check
As for those of us who’ve been dismissed, this part is for you. When a little voice says maybe you’re overreacting, maybe it’s you, run this quick check before you believe it. After any appointment, ask yourself:
☐ Did I feel heard?
☐ Did I feel safe saying everything I needed to say?
☐ Were my questions answered?
☐ Did I leave with a next step, like a plan, a referral, a test, or a follow-up?
Think of it like the math from before:
Heard + Safe + Answered + Next Step = a good visit.
If one piece is missing, you have options. You can name it at your next appointment: “I didn’t feel like we got to the bottom of this.” Or, if it keeps happening, you can see someone else. Either way, a missing piece doesn’t mean you’re overreacting. It means the visit isn’t finished.
This check is a tool for reflection, not medical advice. If something about your health worries you, talk with a licensed healthcare provider.
What Could Be Different
Imagine what could change if we all asked these questions and released the shame, pain, and hurt we hold.
Maybe if a dad can heal the shame he carries from being left alone with his emotions as a kid, he could show up for his own child’s tears, or apologize for the times he didn’t. And that child wouldn’t have to take on the burden of not being believed, or wonder whether she’s overreacting years down the road.
Maybe if a doctor is able to heal the wounds they carry, they won’t stop at the simplest answer. They’ll see a patient who keeps coming back for help as a sign she needs support, and they won’t let her slip through the cracks.
I never needed these doctors to have all the answers. I know many of them did the best they could with the information they had. I just needed one to say:
I believe you. I don’t know yet. Let’s find out.
Note: This essay shares my personal experience and my views as a therapist. It is for general information and reflection only. It is not medical advice, and it does not replace care from a licensed healthcare provider.
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