The Prologue is almost a teaser, as Abby tells us about a very bad day when she was in college, with physical symptoms she had never experienced before and didn’t understand. Abby Norman is a woman in her 20s who is learning as much about the disease of endometriosis as she can so that she can leave behind something that others can build on so that she can help advance knowledge about a “woman’s disease” that has been noted but mostly ignored for centuries simply because it is a “woman’s disease” (although, it turns out, it actually isn’t it’s just more rare and manifests differently in males-see Chapter 6).ĪMAMU follows different tracks and timelines, switching between the personal and the clinical.

Many people, when they get close to the end of their life, feel a need to leave a legacy, or a remembrance, or some token that they made a difference in this world. Abby’s descriptions of her conditions and treatments are graphic (albeit smoothed with self-deprecating humor) and concern the “icky parts” of a woman’s system. This will not be a comfortable read for many men, and some women. At the airport, I bought the electronic version for iBooks, because I didn’t want to wait three days to finish it. I bought Abby’s book in hardcover, so to save weight I did not bring it on a trip. Or if they cannot diagnose her, at least shut up and listen to what she has to say about her own symptoms, and what she’s learned about the disease that’s killing her.Īsk Me About My Uterus (AMAMU) is not precisely a page-turner, but it drew me in and got me hooked. Or if they can’t fix her, correctly diagnose her condition. She is a young woman who is very sick, and would like doctors to fix her. Instead she has spent her entire adult life - and she is not yet thirty - fighting the medical establishment to prove that she is not a hypochondriac, nor a hysteric, nor a fanciful delusional woman who likes to read medical descriptions online. I am not a doctor - but I might have been.” That is not how Abby begins her book - that introduction does not show up until Chapter 7, when she uses it for a presentation she is making to an endometriosis conference - but it should begin any discussion of Abby Norman’s book, because you need to understand that Abby has a brilliant mind that should have been in use for the medical benefit of humanity. A quest to make doctors believe in women’s pain

Abby norman ask me about my uterus