Penny was told her agonising pain was just ovulation. The next day, she was begging to die

AdvertisementSaveYou have reached your maximum number of saved items.Remove items from your saved list to add more.ShareAAAThe memory of her child begging to die still makes Julia Holmwood feel physically sick.

Her 12-year-old daughter, Penny, was tough. A few weeks earlier, she was dragging herself out of the pool during a water polo tournament, covered in bruises, but never complaining.Now, Julia said she was slumped in a wheelchair at the local emergency department – unable to walk, struggling to hold her head upright, screaming in pain and passing out.

She said the ED doctor examined Penny’s initial results and declared this was ordinary period pain.Julia recalls the doctor telling them: “My wife gets her period, she just takes naproxen and gets on with it.”Penny’s torturous symptoms were not caused by her period.

She had a rare bacterial infection of the sacroiliac joint, a life-threatening medical emergency that needed urgent diagnosis and antibiotics to prevent permanent bone damage, or worse.Her parents believe she could have died if not for the intervention of another doctor later that day.AdvertisementThe case is just one of more than 400 accounts submitted to this masthead’s medical misogyny investigation in which women and girls reportedly had their pain dismissed, minimised, declared imaginary, or written off as a mental health problem.

The impact was often profound. One woman died of cancer after her pain was repeatedly dismissed as menopausal. Others were left permanently disabled, in chronic pain or with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Many were denied necessary scans to investigate their symptoms or were “treated like a drug seeker when requesting pain relief”.Women were told that excruciating periods or pelvic pain that caused fainting and vomiting were normal. Others recounted seeing surgeons for a physical injury, only to be told they were depressed or hypersensitive.

Experts say that the vast majority of healthcare workers don’t intend to discriminate against women, but the bias facing women in pain was real, harmful and stemmed from persistent society-wide attitudes that cast women as “dramatic” and “hysterical”.“I think people assume that sexism no longer exists, but it certainly exists in healthcare,” said Professor Louise Sharpe, a clinical psychologist and researcher at the University of Sydney.AdvertisementGender equity and pain experts, and a landmark government inquiry, have called for urgent training for doctors, nurses and medical students in unconscious gender biases, and a recognition that concluding a woman’s pain is all in her head can overlook a more likely scenario: the cause of her pain is unknown because it is chronically under-researched.

“This is just a pain that you get as a woman.”The more than 2000 women who responded to this masthead’s medical misogyny investigation ranged in age from children into their 90s. They reported systemic, conscious, or unconscious gender bias that negatively affected diagnosis and treatment.

Penny Holmwood said she was struck by feeling her problems were being blamed simply on her being female. In 2023, she was twice ferried to her local emergency department, on NSW’s Central Coast, and told her pain was nothing extraordinary.Penny Holmwood is transported by ambulance to hospital.

Her periods had not long begun, but she knew such extreme suffering should be taken seriously.“I remember being told something like, ‘This is just a pain that you get as a woman’,” said Penny, now 15.Advertisement“I’ve woken up in the morning almost about to vomit from period pains, but this was different.”

According to the Holmwoods’ subsequent complaint, the first time Penny was taken to her local ED, she was discharged unable to walk, with a diagnosis of ovulation pain.By the next morning, Penny was repeatedly asking to die. Her teeth were chattering.

Asked where it hurt, she would point shakily to her right hip.Penny’s parents Julia and Lindsay Holmwood were “appalled” by their daughter’s treatment at their local ED.Janie Barrett.

Julia Holmwood said a female paramedic who helped take them to hospital that day left her with some firm advice: “Even if the doctors believe it’s ‘just’ endometriosis (she emphasised the ‘just’ in air quotes), don’t leave the hospital until they work this out. Penny can’t keep going home in this level of pain.“However, the Holmwoods said the fixation on menstruation seemed to continue until Julia snapped at the doctor, telling him: “If she had a penis her pain would be considered more interesting.

“When Penny was admitted to the ward that afternoon, they encountered a new doctor who prescribed antibiotics, Julia said.Advertisement“If this doctor hadn’t intervened, we feel Penny could have ended up critically ill or, in the worst-case scenario, died,” Julia said.“I would love to know that doctor’s name and thank her.”

‘We are furious at how Penny’s pain was minimised and dismissed in [the] ED. It was dismissed as a women’s health problem. E