The idea for MyAdvo took root after my first gynecological surgery and a year of COVID lockdowns. Today, I’m going to tell you about 4 life events: that first surgery, my grandmother falling terminally ill, egg freezing, and breaking my spine. All taught me the same lesson when it comes to our healthcare system: women must learn how to advocate for themselves when they go to the doctor.
 

I vividly remember my first gynecologist visit.

They casually mentioned I had a vaginal septum (and because you're dying to know… a vaginal septum is a tissue that divides the vagina in two). Explains why I leaked through my tampon less than 30 min after putting one in. It's technically a congenital anomaly, meaning I was born with it. None of that was actually explained to me in that first appointment. Instead, the doctor shooed me out of the room because I was her last appointment of the day. Cue my deep dive down the Google rabbit hole. I really wanted to talk to someone who could acknowledge that I was not an alien for being born with a tissue dividing me. Luckily, I had a coworker who experienced polyps and recommended her gynecologist (you’d think the original doctor would have at least given me a referral. Apart from her, it felt pretty taboo to talk about anything wrong “down there.” My mom had never experienced something like this, while my sister was still too young to relate. I couldn’t share with girlfriends. Young graduates, we were busy spending our newly earned money on the hot new bar and racking up dating stories, NOT our vagina monologues.

​

With hardly anyone to talk to and no medical professional to guide me through next steps, I not only felt isolated but totally out of control when I kept receiving more diagnoses: a uterine and cervical septum, adenomyosis, and fibroids. A few months before the pandemic hit, I finally went through surgery to remove the vaginal and uterine septum as well as a fibroid. Post-surgery, I decided I’d figure out how to save enough to freeze my eggs by the time I turned 30. I found myself in the same conundrum as when I first got diagnosed with that vaginal septum; I didn’t know where to start nor anyone who had gone through egg freezing. And again, it wasn’t exactly coworker small talk or a fun girlfriend catch-up to ask about egg freezing in your-mid twenties. With a pandemic lockdown backdrop, the idea for MyAdvo really sunk in – could I make it easier to connect women with similar health journeys and goals?

​

Since then, life’s come extremely fast.

It accelerated – 2 caregiving experiences for grandparents in hospice and palliative care, 2 egg freezing surgeries, and 1 spinal fracture. During each of these, a combination of the same things kept happening: doctor dismissal, sometimes even contempt, confusion at where to start to get answers, and a fear that no one wanted to hear about illness, injury, or death. When my grandmother got a UTI that undid the heart surgery she went through the year before, they gave her max 2 months to live. My family was devastated. I took on figuring out how to transfer her hospital care at home, where she wanted to spend her last days. I had no idea what I was doing, and it’s not like there’s a “how-to" playbook for millennial kids handling end of life. After she passed, I went ahead with egg freezing because she was all for it. I assumed I’d feel more in control navigating healthcare since this was my choice, but I faced the same black box I’d just dealt with. How could this be just as overwhelming as working through my grandmother’s hospice care? By the time I got into the accident abroad that fractured my spine and was dealing with an ER doctor, towering over my body and scoffing that I couldn’t actually be in that much pain, I’d understood no one was going to help me but myself.

​

It’s infuriating how healthcare has NO incentive to change,

and how much it’s on women to push through. Doctors will downplay women’s symptoms or just straight up deny their pain. And even if women get correctly diagnosed, they’re left on their own to follow through on doctor’s recommendations. Detrimental, when women have been taught that admitting anything wrong with their reproductive health is taboo.

• 1 in 5 women report their doctors ignore or dismiss their symptoms.

• For every woman diagnosed with a women's health condition, 4 go undiagnosed.

• Before COVID, medical errors ranked as the third leading cause of death behind heart disease (the leading killer of women) and cancer.

• Women are twice as likely to die from misdiagnosed heart attacks than men.

These stats are only a few examples of how much the healthcare system works against women. Why are women so overlooked in healthcare? First, the female body is under-researched and under-funded. It wasn’t until 1993 that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandated including women in clinical trials to receive funding. But it wasn’t until 2016, that sex as a biological variable was factored into research. To translate: before 2016, researchers were not required to include the female sex in clinical research. 

Doctors can’t properly diagnose or treat women if the research for diseases that disproportionately affect us just isn’t there.

​

​