The author with her children in 2016.

How much pain is too much to bear? Where do you draw the line? I asked myself these questions as I sat on the cold examination table in my then-OB-GYN’s office last June.

I had always had painful monthly periods. They got worse in my 20s and became excruciating in my 30s. And when I hit perimenopause a few years ago, I began getting those debilitating periods twice a month.

That day in June, I explained to my doctor that I had been bleeding almost all month and was in constant pain. Advil and even prescribed narcotics didn’t touch the pain. I had gone from being bedridden two days per month to four. I had become profoundly depressed. Was this what the rest of my life would be like?

I reminded my doctor that because I have a family history of uterine and ovarian cancers, I thought it was best to come see him, as things felt “off”. He seemed… annoyed. And in a hurry, which he always was.

He spent exactly two minutes on the ultrasound of my uterine lining then said, “It all looks good!”

“But,” I said, “I’m bleeding so much my iron is low. I’m in a lot of pain. This can’t be normal.”

He shrugged and said: “Take an iron vitamin for the deficiency.”

Then he added the two words that were so extremely unhelpful, so lacking in empathy, and so clueless that they turned out to be the final straw: “Periods hurt!”

It took everything in me not to make him hurt in that moment. He had no idea what I felt, no idea of how much periods actually hurt. I wanted to scream and swear at him, tell him he would crumble after even a minute of this agony, let alone years of it. But because of a lifetime of conditioning, I was silent. I was polite, even.

By then, I was used to not being taken seriously. I’d had enough dismissive doctors in my life, as far back as my male paediatrician telling me when I was seven to “calm down and not worry so much” because he thought my hives were caused by anxiety. It turned out to be Fifth Disease.

This wasn’t even the first time this OB-GYN had dismissed me. For the last seven years, at each appointment, I mentioned how my cramps were so awful and so frequent that I could barely walk, that no medicine was lessening the blinding pain. It got worse with every year that passed.

And I believed him when he told me, at every visit, that this was just how it was in endometriosis or perimenopause. I believed my doctor because I (foolishly) trusted his authority. I believed him because suffering is subjective (maybe I just had a low threshold for pain?). I believed him because I didn’t know how to advocate for myself.

I later learned that I was........

© HuffPost