I didn’t take my first chance to vote. I was 18 in 2004. I was a virgin. I didn’t watch the news. I was probably at a party or popping in a pretentious VHS tape or kissing someone wearing Vans. It was hard to see the choice—between one white man in a suit who had started an endless war and another white man in a suit whose politics seemed only marginally less troubling—as a personal one. I could not have been more wrong.
We all have the issue that calls us to action, which hits close enough to home that we are inspired to participate politically. For some, it’s the changing climate destroying their homes; for others, their experience with college loans. For me, it was when my body began to fail me, a development that ultimately allowed me to understand how interlinked every crisis facing our nation really is. Our health care system is the place where the Venn diagram of every form of injustice meets. But, like so much in life, I had to see it to believe it, to really comprehend what second-wave feminists meant when they chanted, “The personal is political.”
It’s no secret that I have been a weary traveler through the medical-industrial complex. I’ve written extensively for this magazine about my history with endometriosis and chronic pain, the endless circles I walked just to get answers, the emergency-room visits all over the country when symptoms were out of control (I’ve often joked that I could write a book called A Doctor in Every Port), and the radical hysterectomy that was ultimately necessary. What I have written less about were the men—so many men—whom I met on that journey. (While roughly 85% of practicing ob-gyns are women, 62% of practicing physicians are men, and they make up roughly two thirds of the emergency medical field.) Some were established doctors, some were interns, some were anesthesiologists. There were ones who sent me home bleeding too much, explaining my period to me like I was in fifth-grade health ed. There were the ones who eyed me with skepticism when I rated my cramps as a 10 on the pain scale. There were the ones who carelessly reached inside me as if I were a car with a faulty engine and not a human woman gasping at the careless intrusion.
After my first endometriosis surgery, I was placed in the urology ward at a prominent New York hospital. The rooms were much nicer, explained my doctor (out of network, it should be stated, and found after turning over every rock and finally consulting the Endometriosis Foundation of America). A wealthy man with prostate cancer had made a generous donation that allowed for wood paneling and flat-screen TVs versus the peeling yellow walls and tiny televisions with three channels up in obstetrics and gynecology. I was told to walk every day after the surgery, up and down the hall eight times. I pulled my IV bag alongside men named Frank and Bob, who chatted easily about sports as the nurses guided them. I thought about the women upstairs, waiting to have their bedpans changed, wondering who had forgotten about them. I thought of the women in state hospitals and jails who would regard the ignored obstetrics wing as an incredible upgrade. I thought of the women waiting outside emergency rooms all over the country, too afraid to go in and face the cost. I thought of the women who wouldn’t even consider parking outside.