Last year, I wrote about my colonoscopy experience in pretty great detail — in part to help people with medical anxiety get a textured understanding of what to expect, but also as a sort of service journalism to encourage people to schedule their own colonoscopies if they have family history or are over the age of 45, because a lot of people. Talk about the thing, and people think about the thing. I want to publish a follow-up featuring people's experiences with fibroids, which are chronically underdiagnosed, ignored, or generally dismissed — and are significantly more common amongst Black people with uteruses, who often have to deal with compounding medical racism in order to get them diagnosed and adequately treated. Sharing your story here (with as much anonymity as you'd like) will hopefully help others identify symptoms and be better advocates for themselves within a very broken medical system.

[Here's the colonoscopy piece, for reference: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/welcome-to-colonoscopy-land]

I ask for email addresses so that I can ask clarifying questions if needed, but will not disclose your identity in any way. Responses will be lightly edited and condensed for length; for an example of what this looks like in practice, here's a recent piece on family estrangement: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/what-you-dont-know-about-family-estrangement?utm_source=url