Hot Girls Have Stomach Issues. Smart Girls Get Them Checked.

Maddy Brown

14 hours ago

5 min read

We've spent so long being told that female suffering is intrinsic that we've begun to buy into the lie ourselves. It's time to take back the responsibility of advocating for ourselves.

Fifteen hours into what was supposed to be a magical family holiday in Kauai, I found myself in a narrow bed with a scratchy blanket in the island's only emergency room. I waited for the combination of morphine and Dilaudid to kick in while I vomited into a hospital-issued bag that my mum said looked like a giant condom, which was perhaps the only funny part of the entire excruciating situation. Admittedly, the humour was lost on me at the time.

We arrived in Kauai at 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday. At 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, I woke up with searing pain in my abdomen, a deep and relentless torment that persisted no matter how many medications, positions or warm baths I tried. It eliminated my ability to even drag myself off the bathroom floor, where I remained for hours, crying and moaning in pain.

By 7:30 a.m., my parents decided it was time to take me to the hospital. My mum tentatively asked me if I was sure I wasn't pregnant; the way I was acting, she thought I might be going into labour (spoiler alert: I wasn't). At the hospital, I had my first-ever CT scan, and by noon, there was a surgeon in my room telling me that I had a tumour in my ovary and I'd have to have emergency surgery in three hours or I'd lose the organ, or maybe even my life.

The tumour was approximately the size of a baseball, 12 centimetres in diameter, resting in my right ovary. It was a teratoma, an ovarian cyst that grows from germ cells, and after years of growing to this size, it had developed human teeth, hair and muscle. Now, it was causing ovarian torsion, in which the tumour causes the ovary to twist on itself, causing immense pain and cutting off its blood supply. My surgeon explained that it was like a tetherball: once the ovary was fully twisted, it wouldn't unwind. In my case, it had wound around itself three times.

The news was shocking, of course, but not at all unbelievable. Through the haze of strong medication and still-constant pain, I recalled all the issues over the years that I had written off as “women's trouble”. I thought of “hot girls have stomach issues”, the phrase touted in hashtags and memes. Female suffering had become so accepted that it was an internet joke, not something for women to take seriously.

It had been easy to delude myself into such a way of thinking, especially when that was the mantra I'd been fed. I remember navigating through Los Angeles traffic some years ago and spotting the pink BelliWelli billboards that advertised in aesthetic lettering: “Hot Girls Have IBS!” So effing true, I had thought to myself. And I just kept driving, completely missing the fact that female suffering was now normalised enough to be a marketing tactic.

Because being in pain felt like, at best, a badge of honour for a woman, and at worst, just something that was to be endured and commiserated about. It wasn't until I was lying in that hospital cot, awaiting the first major surgery of my life, that I realised I'd allowed myself to be utterly duped about my own health.

Sure, hot girls have stomach issues, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth getting checked out. I, like so many other women, hadn't bothered to get my myriad of health issues addressed by a doctor for two reasons. One: I didn't think I'd be taken seriously, just like I hadn't been taken seriously in the past. Two: I had been led to believe that physical suffering was just a thing that women had to do.

Let's address the former point first. In my freshman year of college, I came down with debilitating stomach pain that lasted for days. At the campus medical centre, I was given a cursory once-over, had my belly pressed by an indifferent doctor to make sure it wasn't appendicitis, and then told to take Tylenol and come back if the pain became worse. But it is worse, I thought. That's why I'm here.

But, being young, naive and still somewhat convinced that these people somehow knew my body better than I did, I just struggled home and went about my day. When the pain finally subsided, I wrote it off as constipation that had resolved itself (hey, no shame here. Hot girls have stomach issues, remember?) and didn't give it another thought until Kauai.

At the time, I figured that if the medical professionals who spent years learning how to figure out what was wrong with people weren't all that concerned, then I shouldn't be either. I had yet to realise that self-advocacy when it comes to one's health is an absolute necessity for women, and a tool that we are rarely encouraged to practise.

I also gradually came to understand, from this experience in college, from a lifetime of doctor's appointments and from conversations with female friends and family members, that suffering was just the deal I was saddled with. Until, of course, it wasn't. Until it had got bad enough for me to be taken seriously by my family, who took me to a hospital where I was then taken seriously by the staff, who revealed that something was seriously wrong with me.

It's a weird thing to be experiencing feelings of extreme validation while vomiting one's guts out in agony, high on pain medication. But validation was exactly what I felt. Suddenly, everything made sense; every little physical issue or pain from the preceding years slotted together until I could see the complete picture of my health floating above me, backlit by fluorescent hospital lights.

When it comes to our own bodies and the pain they experience, we've been rocked into complacency, lulled into passivity, systemically beaten into self-submission by the double-edged blade of an unempathetic, overworked medical industry and casual misogyny. That women don't really feel the suffering we say we do is a lie fed to us by a system that doesn't believe us, and thus tries to convince us not to believe ourselves. But I had learnt the painful lesson that if no one else was going to listen to me about my health, then I had to.

Now look, I'm not saying the adage “hot girls have stomach issues” isn't true. All I'm saying is that the hottest girls actually do something about it.