As it flows through her

Works on paper, various sizes
2023

Watercolor and color pencil, 15 x 20 inch
As the title suggests, it reflects on the female experience, of pain in particular.

In 2023, I listened to the podcast The Retrievals, which centered on the story where the women patients at the Yale Fertility Center experienced excruciating pain during their egg retrieval procedures, due to a nurse stealing fentanyl and replacing it with saline. What strikes me most about it is the collective neglect and downplay of women’s pain, even within women who are suffering themselves. It seems to me that it’s precisely this looking away from women’s pain that enables us to procreate and keep the species going, while putting motherhood on top of women as human beings.

Watercolor and digital manipulation, 7 x 10 inch
When I was a teenager, I suffered from severe period cramps. While I screamed in bed, my dad questioned, “is it really that bad?” The advice he offered was “once you get married, this pain will go away”. My mom had uterine fibroids. She was often in pain and bled substantially before her entire uterus was removed. My dad never quite understood how she could bleed so much without even noticing.

Research indicates that women experience greater clinical pain, suffer greater pain-related distress, and show heightened sensitivity to experimentally induced pain compared with men. [1]

However, perceived sex introduces a systematic bias leading to inaccurate pain estimation, with underestimation of women’s pain and overestimation of men’s relative to their reports of their own pain. [2]

[1] Paller, C.J., Campbell, C.M., Edwards, R.R. and Dobs, A.S. (2009), Sex-Based Differences in Pain Perception and Treatment. Pain Medicine, 10: 289-299. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-4637.2008.00558.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-4637.2008.00558.x)

[2] Zhang L, Losin EAR, Ashar YK, Koban L, Wager TD. Gender Biases in Estimation of Others’ Pain. J Pain. 2021 Sep;22(9):1048-1059. doi: 10.1016/j.jpain.2021.03.001. Epub 2021 Mar 5. PMID: 33684539; PMCID: PMC8827218.

Watercolor and digital manipulation, 7 x 10 inch