A note from Dr. Farzana Badrun
I keep a mental list — not written down anywhere, just something I carry — of the number of times a patient has answered, “How are you managing?” by telling me about everyone except herself. Her mother’s cardiologist appointment. Her son’s parent-teacher meeting. The refill she remembered for her husband but not her own prescription, sitting empty for two weeks. It is never a complaint when she says it. It’s just how the sentence comes out, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be last on your own list.
I understand that instinct because I have lived it. But I have also sat across from women, years later, untangling something that would have been simple to catch early — if there had been room, back then, for the conversation to happen at all.
Some of it is generational — the idea that a doctor’s office is for emergencies, not foSome of it is older than any one person’s schedule: a long pattern of women’s symptoms getting waved off as “just stress,” “just hormones,” or “probably nothing” — often before anyone has actually looked closely enough to know. That history teaches women to stop pushing after the first brush-off, even when something in them says the answer wasn’t complete.
r the slow, quiet stuff: the fatigue that’s become normal, the weight that won’t budge, the mood that’s flatter than it used to be. Some of it is just discomfort. Sexual health, mental health, bathroom habits — nobody’s rehearsed how to bring those up casually, so they don’t get brought up at all.
So here is what an unhurried visit is actually for, in practice. It is time enough to ask about the chest pain you assumed was just acid reflux, the night sweats and irregular periods you’ve chalked up to stress, the UTIs that keep coming back and you’ve just learned to expect, the family history of breast or ovarian cancer that’s never actually come up in a doctor’s office before now. My job in that time isn’t just to listen — it’s to connect what you tell me to the right referral, the right screening, the right specialist, so you’re not the one left holding the thread between five different doctors who don’t talk to each other.
You don’t need a diagnosis to bring any of this up. You need to stop waiting for a better time, because there rarely is one — and hand a little of that list to someone whose job is to actually carry it with you.
— Dr. Farzana Badrun
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