Always such a pleasure to read your stuff. Even the heartbreaking stuff. I remember Gilda Radner’s death like it was yesterday. She didn’t seem too young then. Today, I’m 43, and she seems..no, she WAS… far too young.

No one ever talked about female cancers like they were actually a thing, back then. We knew about breast cancer, of course. But uterine, and cervical, and ovarian cancers were on no one’s radar.

It would be just a few years later that I would be diagnosed with severe cervical dysplasia and have a fair portion of my cervix cut out. I spent the next 20 years thinking I was going to carry HPV forever. It was only recently that I learned that women can clear that virus from their systems.

Female reproductive cancer education is weak, still. STI education is weak. When I hear about brave women speaking out about their herpes virus or HIV status and learn of the abuse they face from online trolls, it absolutely sickens me.

Because you’re right--Gilda Radner should not have died. And neither should thousands and thousands of other women. Doctors don’t listen to their female patients. They write them off as “hysterical” or “overly dramatic” and it has to stop. Because we are DYING.

Thanks.