From period pain to the pain scale: why we struggle with the language of pain, with Kate Downey

[00:00:00] Hi, Kate. Welcome to Overlooked. Hi, Golda. Welcome to Cramped. So this is a fun collaboration. So let's introduce ourselves, shall we, for everybody who's maybe new to listening to us or existing but who doesn't know who the other person is. Yes, I love that. Okay, I'm Kate Downey. I host a podcast called Cramped about period pain. Do you?

[00:00:29] My name is Golda Arthur, and I host a podcast about women's health that's called Overlooked because guess what we are? Yeah. So obviously we got in touch and realized we're making podcasts about very similar overlapping stuff. So we should do an episode together. And I'm so happy that we are doing this because I think, you know, our audience not just kind of cares about the same things, but if you're listening to this, I'm pretty sure if you listen to Kate

[00:00:57] show and if you listen to my show, you get frustrated about the same things as well. Yes. And frustrated is putting it mildly. Yeah. I tell people they have to take rage breaks. Yes. From listening to the podcast sometimes. Yeah. Tell me your origin story for Overlooked. So I've been an audio journalist, in fact, for years now. I want to say 25, but that would be impossible because that would make me older than 25. What's going on?

[00:01:23] Yeah. So yeah, 25 years, I'm pretty sure I've been in journalism and in podcasting. About eight years ago, my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and she has been, she is living, in fact, with ovarian cancer this whole time. And I started, you know, digging around on the Internet, be like, what is ovarian cancer? What do I need to know about it? And I just did not see anything that I could understand.

[00:01:46] My emotions at the time as well were kind of like freaking out. And everything I saw out there was like, we don't know much about ovarian cancer. Very simple questions. Why does it start? What do we know about this? How do we prevent it? How do we screen for it? Nothing. Right. And I thought, okay, so why can't I ask these questions on a microphone and have somebody who knows more than I do? Like, just tell me to my face. Like, what is the reason we don't know anything about ovarian cancer?

[00:02:11] So that's what I did. I started out with that first season. I thought it was going to be a one and done. But in looking at the ovaries, I came up against like a bunch of other questions. And the answer was the same. We don't know.

[00:02:26] Yeah. It's like this lack of research. And the thing that infuriated me was that in not knowing, we're costing women their health, we're costing women their lives. And like, why the hell don't we know? And people said, hey, are you making more episodes? And I thought, well, there's other stories I could be curious about and be irritated about. So I kept the show going. And that was three years ago.

[00:02:53] Wow. And the criteria really for being on Overlooked is that you have to talk about something that's like really not getting talked about enough. And it's been a really eye-opening journey for me. But over to you, Kate, like tell me your story.

[00:03:08] I mean, it's crazy like how exactly our paths were the same, but we came in from different angles. So I have had severe period pain since I was 14, since I got my period. I would throw up when I got my period. I would throw up for like eight hours. Like I would just start throwing up and not be able to stop.

[00:03:26] I would spend a full day or night curled up around the toilet on the bathroom floor. I would pass out from my pain. I would go to the ER and they would kind of shrug at me and like give me an anti-nausea medication. Even when I was telling them, this is period pain. I am throwing up for eight hours and deeply dehydrated because of period pain. You need to give me something like a muscle relaxer or something like that.

[00:03:49] And they would always give me an IV anti-nausea first. Very frustrating trying to get care for period pain. And through for 22 years, I had this pain. My mom was very concerned, took me to the doctor when I was 14. And she said, yeah, some women just have bad period pain and it'll go away when you have your first kid. And I was like, well, I'm 14, so that's not super helpful. OK. What? Yep. And I got, you know, I got put on birth control. I got told to just take more ibuprofen.

[00:04:17] So then my stomach got really messed up. When I was in high school, I would very cautiously try to bring this pain up with my friends and be like, do you guys get like really bad cramps? And they'd be like, yeah, cramps suck. Absolutely. And I'd be like, oh, OK, I guess I'm just bad at this. Like, I guess there's just something like weird and wrong with me and the way that doctors responded to my pain. And when I would tell them how bad my pain was, when my mom would tell them how bad my pain was, they would just kind of shrug.

[00:04:45] And they'd be like, oh, weird. Yeah, you can try taking more ibuprofen. It just was this message that like, oh, we've never heard of this. Like, this is a weird thing that just your body is doing that we can't really help you with. And that's very scary as a teenager. And so I just tried to ignore it. I tried to get through every death cramp situation as best I could and then live my life and not think about it until the next month.

[00:05:15] When I finally got to college, I started talking to other people and found more and more people where it was like, oh, my God, you too? Like, you have this? Wait. And doctors can't tell you anything either? Like, that's so weird. And there were enough of us that I was like, hang on. There can't be this many of us. And doctors are like, never heard of it. There's got to be something else going on here. I also had a crazy career that makes no sense where I was doing theater at the Public Theater and New York City Opera.

[00:05:44] I did renegade museum tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I co-founded a science comedy theater in New York City called Caveat that is still up and running. And during the pandemic, I pivoted into podcast production. And so after a few years of producing podcasts for places like Wondery and Pushkin and some other like really wonderful independent productions,

[00:06:08] I pitched a science communication grant organization, an idea for a podcast where I was like, I want to finally get answers about my period pain. And I had this tagline, I suspect that having a microphone will get me more answers than having a uterus. My grant proposal was accepted and I got a grant to make 10 episodes, a limited series. I called it cramped. I came up with 10 questions like, what is hurting when I'm having cramps? I don't even know. My uterus, I guess, but like what?

[00:06:38] Why is my pain dismissed when I go to the ER? Just question after question after question. And I just hunted down answers and found experts I could ask these questions to, talk to other people who had been having this pain too, and compared stories. And after 10 episodes, I had a diagnosis of endometriosis.

[00:06:58] I was scheduled for a surgery because I had, in fact, gotten a test done that showed that I had extensive scarring in my peritoneal cavity and that I had a blocked and dilated fallopian tube that was adhered to my uterus. And that's where all my pain was coming from. And I got surgery in July of 2025. And since then, I have had no severe period pain. Oh, my gosh. What do you know?

[00:07:24] The amount of messages I got during the course of the 10-episode series, people saying like, oh, my God, I went to medical school and I learned more about women's health care listening to this than I did in medical school. People messaging me and saying, I was scheduled for an ablation surgery and I listened to your interview with the endometriosis surgeon who said ablation surgery is the wrong surgery. It can make things much worse.

[00:08:16] I'm so glad you are. Firstly, that sounds like a long and painful journey. But I'm glad that that you've managed to kind of sort things out because I say this only anecdotally, but like pain changes your brain. I think it changes how you think about things. I mean, it certainly changes what you do and don't do in your life and the actions that you take. I've come to the conclusion that pain changes how you think. Oh, it does. Because there's actually like a ton of I mean, a ton.

[00:08:44] There's some research about how chronic pain and especially chronic pelvic pain and inflammation like you get with endometriosis and a lot of other conditions that cause severe period pain. There is a lot of rewiring your neural pathways. And there is a lot of sensitization that, you know, it's not like we think more pain makes us more tolerant to pain.

[00:09:09] But often more pain, especially unaddressed pain and chronic pain leads to your body actually being more sensitive to stimulus where something that might not have hurt before now suddenly hurts. We still don't know that much about it, but it definitely changes our relationship to pain. And it also seems to change our relationship to anxiety and depression.

[00:09:33] Serotonin and dopamine have a really close relationship with estrogen and progesterone, and they have not been studied like that. And so all of the medications for these issues really don't take into account the hormone cycles that so many people naturally have. So let's let's talk about pain. And I think what we're both fascinated by is, yes, pain generally and pain in women generally.

[00:10:01] But the language around pain, I think, is just so fascinating. Yeah, shocker. Two podcasters are interested in the language of something. Yeah. And I think the first time I heard this line, I was really shocked. A couple of years ago, I talked to a woman called Gabriel Jackson. And she wrote a really brilliant book called Pain and Prejudice. Oh, yeah, I've heard of this book.

[00:10:29] It's a great read. I highly recommend it. And Gabriel also has endometriosis. And the book is also about how she finds out that she has endometriosis and a historical look at how pain has been dismissed by the medical establishment. So when she talked about pain, she gave a specific instance. And I think she was basing this on a paper that was written about it. And I'll dig out the paper and add the link in the show notes. But she was talking about the word stabbing.

[00:10:59] You know, medicine is made by men for men. So all the language they use are language that men use. And the kind of language that women use is like stabbing pains. It felt like a knife was cutting through me. And these are like dramatic, you know, dramatic words, dramatic imagery. And so a lot of doctors think, yeah, okay, that's a hysterical woman talking there.

[00:11:28] And these language isn't really in the medical literature. But also men experience pain differently. This is the really tricky part. A lot of diseases are experienced different in women's bodies, which we're only just now, you know, learning about. But it may be that men don't have these kind of stabbing pains or many fewer men than women have these kind of sharp stabbing pains.

[00:11:50] But stabbing pains is so common among women to describe a certain pain in your pelvis that it's so – I couldn't believe when I read that study that that's considered dramatic language because that's just very factual language to me. That's fascinating. I found this amazing paper when I was first researching my series called The Girl Who Cried Pain. That is the meta study about all these different pain studies.

[00:12:17] And they're looking at the differences between the pain that men and women feel but also how the medical providers tend to view and believe things about men's pain and women's pain. And so it kind of like puts it all together. And one of the things that really stuck in my head was most of the medical community is trained on hearing pain signals the way men tend to describe them.

[00:12:43] So men tend to describe their pain more in what it – like what it physically keeps them from doing. So like, oh, I can't put my arm above my head or I can't, you know, get up when I'm sitting down. Whereas women tend to describe their pain more in what it keeps them from doing socially and relationally. So like women tend to say more like, oh, I can't pick my kid up or I can't, you know, get out of bed to go to my friend's birthday party.

[00:13:12] I can't go to school. These researchers were like, oh, well, this is maybe one of the reasons why men tend to get prescribed painkillers for their pain and women tend to get prescribed anti-anxieties and antidepressants when they complain of pain. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, because – and so, you know, the first thought you have is like, oh, well, these doctors are thinking hysteria. This is the hysteria thing, right? They're just thinking, oh, your pain is all in your head. Like here's some anti-anxiety.

[00:13:40] But if you look at the language that is used, doctors have been trained to think like, oh, if someone says – if someone describes their pain the way men describe their pain, then they're in pain and they need a painkiller. If someone describes their pain in the way women describe their pain, it means they're anxious because they're talking about like they feel so bad that they can't, you know, take care of their kids. And so the problem there is their anxiety about it, not the pain that keeps them from doing it. That's crazy. Right? It's such a mindfuck. It's so crazy.

[00:14:10] You know those videos where they strap these machines to men? Yes, the period simulators. The period simulators. I have been trying to get an interview with one of the people who like runs those. I will go seek these out. They have ones where they like – they do it to cops. Those are my favorite. Yeah. So I guess I started to think, all right, okay, so we're all using – you know, we're using different words.

[00:14:38] We're using different ways to describe pain. We're using different language. What would put us all on the same level? And again, goal is to be taken seriously for your pain and to get someone to fix the damn thing, right?

[00:14:52] And so then we come to the pain scale, which is one of my favorite things to talk about in the realm of pain because I think the pain scale is perfectly useless. And for those of you who are like taking a second to be like, what the hell is the pain scale? So you go to the doctor, you go to the ER, and you're like, ouch, it hurts. And they're like, okay, scale of 1 to 10, how much does it hurt?

[00:15:24] You know, I know so many women who have told me this as well. I have done it myself. Within the last six months, I was in the ER, blinding headache, came out of nowhere, found out later it was called a thunderclap headache. And here I am, so-called advocate for women's health, air quotes. And she said, scale of 1 to 10, how much does it hurt? And in my head, I'm thinking 11. And I said 8. And I was like, what? What did I say? Put the words back in the middle of my mouth. No.

[00:15:51] And I, you know, I was really in so much pain. My eyelids were like half open. And I thought, why did I just downplay my pain? And I kind of sat with that as well to think about like, why didn't I do that? What does it mean? What would have happened differently if I had said that? But I have such a problem with the pain scale. I've talked to an emergency room physician. And I've talked to lots of other folks in healthcare who are like, yeah, it's not the best.

[00:16:21] It's not the best thing. And yet, it's like spread like wildflowers in the spring. Everybody uses it because it's kind of a shorthand to just very quickly establish how much pain. But I don't know. I still, I guess they haven't figured out what to replace it with, right? Well, it's really hard, right? I actually, I interviewed two pain researchers out of the GYRL lab in Evanston, Illinois, who are studying period pain.

[00:16:48] And they talked a lot about how difficult it was to talk about pain in a clinical like research oriented way. Because there is no objective measure of pain. Every measure of pain is subjective. It has to be, you know, you can measure someone's heart rate. You can measure, you can see how much they're sweating. You can, there are like things you can do to kind of try to see how much pain they're in.

[00:17:14] But ultimately, like all you can go on is like, how much pain are you experiencing? Like, tell me. And self-reporting is really inaccurate. Partly because we all have different reference points, right? Like someone who has been shot and had four broken limbs, you know, in the past is going to probably have like a different picture of what a 10 on the pain scale is. As opposed to someone who, you know, has been healthy their whole life, has never broken a bone.

[00:17:41] So that's one thing is that like we all have different references. And maybe that doesn't matter if you're coming in and you're saying, I'm at a 10, then that's an emergency, right? Like no matter what your pain scale is. The other side of the coin is that we feel pain very differently in different parts of our body. Like the nerves are different. The one kind of pain we actually understand the best is peripheral pain. It's pain that's on our skin.

[00:18:09] It's like you touch a stove, the stove is hot, you go ouch. We know a lot about how that kind of pain works and how nerves are communicating with your brain and the signals that are being sent. The pain we don't understand very much about is visceral pain, which is period pain, which is any pain in your like organs and viscera. And that pain is really weird because our organs don't have the same kind of sensors that our skin does.

[00:18:36] If you have damaged like an organ or if you have like inflammation, that's going to feel very different than like getting a cut on your skin. And there's like evolutionary theories that we didn't develop very good pain sensors for our organs because if something was wrong with our organs, for most of history, there was nothing we could do about it. And so it was like, it's not evolutionarily beneficial to like know exactly what's going on inside your organs. Either you're dying or you're not dying.

[00:19:05] And so that is something that's very difficult with things like period pain. That is ischemic muscle pain. That is where your muscle cells are not getting enough oxygen because the muscle is so tight that it's not letting oxygenated blood flow through. And so that kind of pain feels a certain way. Inflammation feels a certain way. And we don't necessarily know the difference and we can't communicate that difference. And so that is also a challenge is like visceral pain.

[00:19:34] It's hard to feel accurately. It's hard to communicate. And it's hard for practitioners to like know what's going on just based on the pain signals. So that is completely fascinating. And I'm trying to think of all the instances I've come across this idea of visceral pain and it makes so much sense. You know, most recently, you know, my mom has cancer pain.

[00:19:56] Right. And that is, I think, the definition of visceral pain where you're talking about inflammation, where you're having to take an opioid to try and, you know, keep it in control. When I think of the word visceral, it's a really interesting thing because for really if I had to think about sort of what is my goal as a podcaster.

[00:20:16] Right. And in terms of making the kind of audio that moves people and making the kind of audio that really puts you in someone else's shoes. For example, I don't have endometriosis. And I've talked to a couple of people on the show with endometriosis. And I've told them, you know, before we start recording, like, I want to understand from your point of view what this feels like. And I know it's hard to explain. And so walk me through it.

[00:20:44] And I want to tell you about Kate Reeve. Kate has enno and adenomyosis. And it was a very long journey, you know, similar to yours from being a teenage girl onwards. She finally found a doctor who did help her and did take her seriously and did perform surgery on her. And she walked into that doctor's appointment determined to help him understand what she was actually feeling.

[00:21:13] And so here's how she described it. I went in having finally found the words to accurately describe my pain. And this was huge. Because especially when advocating to a male doctor, but generally when advocating for pain, I think the struggle is so often is that we're kind of at the mercy of the words that we use to describe our pain, having a scale of one to ten and trying to navigate the subjectivity of it all.

[00:21:42] So I told him, and to this day, I am so proud of this description because it is so perfectly on point for what the sensation feels like in my body. But it feels as though my uterus is a pumpkin. And there is an extremely sharp tool, like a hand shovel that you garden with. You know, the one that has, it's like metal and it has a really sharp pointed tip. And I don't know this is called a trowel for any of you who garden.

[00:22:13] But this trowel carving deep into the layers of the pumpkin. Yeah. My sister also has horrible debilitating period pain, like pretty much identical symptoms to what I had. And she so far has not sought out an endometriosis diagnosis. And she is kind of pursuing her own ways of managing the pain.

[00:22:39] But I had her on an episode of Cramped early on because I wanted to talk about, we had never talked about our pain. We weren't both having these death cramps at the same time. But it took us years to talk about it with each other, which was weird because we lived in a very open family. Like it was not a secret. It was not shameful. But like we just never talked about it. And I wanted to have her on to talk about that.

[00:23:01] But we also talked about like how hard it was to describe our pain to other people who like got cramps but didn't get death cramps. And we together kind of like brainstormed a description of what it felt like to have those death cramps. It was basically like an intense squeezing. But like if someone was wearing spiked gloves and they were squeezing, it's pressure but it's also pain.

[00:23:28] It's that and intermittently also like someone was stretching at the same time in your insides. I used to always say I felt like a like a wrung out towel. A towel that had been like wrung out so much that it was just like not even really a towel anymore. God, that's terrible. I can't believe that they haven't figured out how to make this go. Yeah.

[00:23:53] Well, women's pain does not seem to be a big motivator for curiosity. Yeah. Yeah. That is when we will get solutions to all of these diseases. And they're going to decide that because we no longer let them get away with dismissing our pain.

[00:24:19] So I think part of my job, I see part of my job as like a podcaster, which is seems very inadequate in the face of such a fucked up system. But part of my job is to give people this information about the history of our health care system, the reality of the system. We all kind of grow up being told like doctors know more than you. You have to trust doctors. You have to do what doctors say. That's how you stay healthy.

[00:24:47] And we have to break out of that because if you have a uterus, that is not always true. What I want to do is give people the information so that they can advocate for themselves better so that they are not going into doctor's offices with the expectation that this doctor is going to know everything there is to know about their body and their condition.

[00:25:09] When in reality, if you've done some Googling, if you've read a study, you might know as much as your gynecologist. And so like it's really important that people know that going in. And we still have to rely on the medical system for the things that we need sometimes. But like we have to protect ourselves. We have to advocate for ourselves. We have to know what our options are.

[00:25:35] I was so pissed that I went 22 years without knowing what my options were. At no point was I given a choice of like, well, you could have laparoscopic surgery so that we could like see if you have endometriosis. No one ever said that to me. And so we have to do that work ourselves, which sucks. And I hate that we have to do it. But it is much easier to do that when we know about each other, when we know we're not alone in this predicament.

[00:26:02] And when we are connected to each other and we can trade off information. I have a friend who's going through a similar medical thing to me right now. And my doctor had prescribed me this one medication. Her doctor prescribed her a different medication. I looked them up. And I was like, huh, I think based on what I am seeing, based on the information available to me, this medication that she's on would actually be a really good fit for me.

[00:26:28] And I was able to go to my doctor and say, hey, my friend's in the exact same medical situation. She's getting this medication. I'm getting this medication. Why? And he had a reason that he had like prescribed this. And I listened. And, you know, then we had a discussion about like which medication would be a better fit. And I was able to like make a decision based on his information, but also information from other people. It was more options.

[00:26:55] This relationship that we have with our doctors is something that I think about so much at the moment. And in a way, all of the conversations that I've had on Overlooked and exploring, as you say, like why? Why is this happening? Why is anything the way it is? Why this treatment, not that? These questions have preoccupied me so much that I'm doing a series and it's called How to Talk So Your Doctor Listens.

[00:27:25] And it's intended to be a provocative title because you should talk any way you want to talk. Exactly. And your doctor will listen to you. Exactly. But the series is my conversations with doctors, with an ER doctor, with an endocrinologist. Obviously, they're on the show because they are doctors who listen. And it also comes from this memorable experience that I had at the start of perimenopause for me, which at the time I didn't know was perimenopause.

[00:27:53] And I went to a doctor and I said, doctor, I have this like palpitation. I get palpitations. I have this tightening in my chest. It feels like there's a fist in my chest that's pulling everything to the middle. And he looked me, Kate, he looked me square in the eye and he said, don't worry about it, dear. I'm sure it's just in your head. It's just in your mind. And I was like, wait, is he allowed to say that out loud? Sir, you can't say that.

[00:28:21] It's like, did you not get the memo? So after that, I just thought this relationship between a doctor and a patient bears a little bit more looking into. So that's coming up. But it has really been fascinating to hear from doctors as well about pain. And I think it's a thing that's been stuck in a place for a long time.

[00:28:43] And it's evolving now as doctors are thinking differently, as we are advocating differently for ourselves in those conversations with our nine minutes of time with our doctor during an appointment. Right. I just did an episode about AI.

[00:28:59] I spoke to someone who's a pelvic floor physical therapist who was having horrible pain and couldn't get a diagnosis from a doctor and ended up going to a chatbot to help her analyze her symptoms and help her figure out what it could be. And she did it in a really cool way that I wouldn't think of because she's medically trained. And so the way she thinks about diagnoses is different than the way I think about it.

[00:29:25] But she did eventually, with the help of this chatbot, kind of come to a diagnosis that made sense or a condition that seemed like a good fit. And then she was able to go to a doctor and pursue that. And she had to really fight to get the test. They didn't want to give her this test because they did an MRI. And it was like, we don't really see anything. And she had to really fight for it. And, like, she didn't want to tell her doctor she had used AI to get this. And we talked about, like, the limitations of AI.

[00:29:54] And, you know, what I end up thinking is, like, AI is not a perfect tool. Just like the pain scale is not a perfect tool. The system we have is not a perfect tool. There are – it does so much harm. It does so much damage. It is out here wrecking havoc. And yet, if you are stuck in diagnosis limbo and you talk to doctor after doctor and you can't make progress, you can't – you're not getting, like, new leads.

[00:30:22] You're not getting the next step of your care. And an AI chatbot can help you process information and, like, you do it in a way that's careful. You don't just blindly believe it. But you use it as a tool to get to the next step, to be able to go into your doctor and say, hey, I found this study. I found this article on the Mayo Clinic that, like, lists these symptoms and these are my symptoms. Like, can we test? That's not a bad thing.

[00:30:50] Like, we have to use the tools that are – we have to use the deeply flawed tools at our disposal. And hopefully we can do that in a way that doesn't hurt us and doesn't hurt other people as much as possible. But, like, what are we supposed to do? Yeah. And I already have comments on that episode that are, like, I can't listen to this podcast anymore because you're advocating for the use of AI. And it's, like, have you been listening? What? Like, look, you're allowed to stop listening to my podcast for whatever reason you want.

[00:31:20] But, like, if that's your line is, like, people who are in severe pain and are being medically neglected for decades, if you say that they should use a tool that's available to them that is deeply flawed, then, like, nothing – then I can't listen to this podcast anymore. Yeah. Something as simple as using Google is AI tinge. Yeah. And then let's say you go for a mammogram. The likelihood is that AI is reading that mammogram first before a human radiologist takes a look at it.

[00:31:49] And I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Like, the amount of ultrasounds I've had where human ultrasound techs and, like, human analysts have read it and been, like, nothing wrong here. And then you go to one specialist and they're, like, oh, it's clearly visible. It's, like, maybe you do want AI reading your imaging results. No, that makes me hella nervous. As you say, you have to be really skeptical about what's being used, how it's being used, that kind of thing. But I don't think there's any escaping it.

[00:32:19] No, and, like, I said this in the episode about AI, but literally every technological advance that we've gone through as humans, we've had a moral panic about. And, like, I am very pro-regulation. I am very pro, like, put guardrails on it. But I think it's unreasonable to say get rid of it. I think it's unrealistic. And I think there is a huge amount of good that could come from this technology, as with all technologies. And there's a huge amount of harm.

[00:32:48] And that's sort of our paradox as humans is we always exist on that knife's edge of, like, well, it could be really – the things we do could kill everybody and they could save everybody. And ultimately neither one is going to happen. And that's just what our species gets to do, I guess. It's human experience right on the knife's edge. I like that. Okay. Well, we've covered so much ground.

[00:33:13] Speaking of this not being a new thing, our relationship with new technologies and our freakouts about new technologies, neither is this problem of not being able to express our pain with language. Because I found this quote from Virginia Woolf from 1926, Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill. She says, English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.

[00:33:42] Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. I love that. I've actually never read On Being Ill, but I think it's time to check it out from my library, frankly. I mean, Virginia Woolf said everything better. Yes. Well, Kate, it's been so much fun to talk about something that's really not fun to talk about. Yes.

[00:34:10] But it's been just really great, actually, to find the kindred spirit as a podcaster and a women's health advocate. And I've learned a ton from this conversation, so I'm so glad we got to have it. Me too. And talking about Virginia Woolf and, you know, the language of pain, like pain really is part of the human experience. Like it's never going to go away. We're always going to have pain. We want, we're always going to be trying not to. And I think if we can be really human about it, it can be something that brings us together.

[00:34:40] And I really try to do that with cramped is to have period pain is a thing nobody wants, but a lot of us have. And if it's something that can bring us together and give us strength in that we can have this thing in common and share our information about it and, you know, support each other through it. That can be a really net positive, I think. Yeah. And I think the same way about Overlooked as well is that to say to people, you're not in this alone, right?

[00:35:09] Because it is a very isolating experience to experience this level of pain. You're absolutely not alone. I always say it's not the most fun club, but you're not alone. That's right. All right, Kate, thank you so much. It was so great talking to you. Golda, tell my audience where they can find you. You can find me any place you listen to Cramped. And you can also find me on Instagram at OverlookedPod and on the website OverlookedPod.com. And you?

[00:35:39] Yes, you can find Cramped anywhere you listen to podcasts. If you search Cramped, it should come up with a purple logo. You can find me on Instagram at KateHelenDownie. That's my full government name. You can find me on TikTok at KateIsCramped. Awesome. And when you discover Cramped, if you're an Overlooked listener, or when you discover Overlooked, if you're a Cramped listener, first thing you have to do is hit the follow button and then come talk to us. Tell us what you thought about this episode. Tell us what else we should cover.

[00:36:07] I think we both are people who like being in conversation with listeners. So let's keep talking. 100%. Yes. Message me. Talk to me. Email me. Okay. Thanks so much, Kate. All right. Thanks, Golda. Overlooked is here for information and empowerment, but not medical advice. Every person's body is unique. So if you have questions, it is best to speak to your doctor or healthcare provider.

[00:36:37] We're building a community around women's health so that no one is overlooked. If you'd like to be part of it, hit the follow button on this podcast wherever you're listening to this. Or you can show us some love by writing us a review and sharing this episode with someone. Overlooked is written and created by me, Golda Arthur. Jessica Martinez-Dejos is the show's producer. You can stay up to date with the show by signing up for the newsletter and following us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

[00:37:06] We read every review and email. So write to us. Hello at overlookedpod.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.