For any girl who has experienced illness, chronic discomfort, or endometriosis comes an inspiring memoir advocating for reputation of women’s medical issues

In the fall of 2010, Abby Norman’s strong dancer’s body dropped forty pounds and gray hairs begun to sprout from her temples. She was repeatedly hospitalized in excruciating pain, but the doctors insisted it was a urinary tract infection and sent her house with antibiotics. Struggling to get out of bed, significantly less attend class, Norman lowered out of about Request Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Have confidence in Women’s Discomfort university and embarked on what would turn into a years-long journey to discover what was wrong with her. It wasn’t until she took matters into her very own hands–securing a job in a hospital and educating herself over lunchtime reading in the medical library–that she found an accurate analysis of endometriosis.

In Ask Me About My Uterus, Norman describes what it was prefer to have her pain dismissed, to find out it was all in her head, only to be studied seriously when she was accompanied by a boyfriend who confirmed that her performance was, indeed, compromised. Placing her own studies right into a broader historical, sociocultural, and politics context, Norman implies that women’s bodies have long been the battleground of a never-ending war for power, control, medical knowledge, and truth. It is time to refute the fact that being a female is usually a preexisting condition.