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I was sitting in the chair across from her desk, the paper kind that crinkles when you move, and she was typing while I talked, the way they do now, more focused on the screen than on me. I'd come in because of the bloating. I'd actually rehearsed it in the car, because I knew how it would sound. I knew "my stomach gets bloated, especially after I have wine" sounds like nothing. Sounds like every woman who's ever walked into a doctor's office. So I tried to make it sound serious. I told her it was every weekend. I told her it was bad enough that I was changing what I wore. I told her my rings didn't fit some mornings. She nodded the whole time, kept typing, and then she said the thing. "That's pretty normal for your age, honestly. Try cutting back on the salt, drink more water, maybe watch the alcohol." And then she turned the screen slightly to update something, and I saw, upside down, the word she'd typed into my file. Reassurance. That was it. That was the whole visit, summed up in one word, in my permanent record. Not a problem to look into. A patient who needed reassuring. I drove home feeling something I didn't have a word for at the time but I do now. Dismissed. Not wrong. Not crazy. Just gently, politely, professionally waved away, the way you wave away a kid who's worried about a noise in the dark. I want to be honest about something, because I think it's the part that actually matters most. I wasn't drinking heavily. I keep saying this because it's the whole thing. A couple glasses of wine on the weekend. The exact amount she probably has herself. And I knew, sitting in that chair, that my body was reacting to it in a way that wasn't normal, wasn't proportional, wasn't just my age. But I didn't have the language to argue with a doctor. So I went home and did what she said. Cut the salt. Drank the water. Watched the wine. It changed nothing. And here's what nobody tells you about being dismissed. It doesn't just fail to fix the problem. It m
