De makkelijke versie klopt niet: Nederland doet wél aan preventie, meer dan de meeste. En toch wacht ons stelsel, in zijn diepste logica, tot je ziek bent — omdat dat het moment is waarop het geld met zekerheid begint te stromen.

A friend asked me over dinner how she should start tracking her cycle, and I opened my mouth to answer and realised I was about to overwhelm her. So I stopped. Here is the only thing you have to do to start — and it fits in one sentence.

The headaches came on a schedule. So did the flushing, the sleeplessness, the way one glass of wine could undo me in the days before my period and do almost nothing the week after. I thought it was random. It was not.

For years I treated my bloating like a crime scene, and food was always the suspect. Gluten one month, dairy the next. What I kept missing was the timing — it wasn't my plate, it was the conversation between my gut bacteria and my estrogen.

Everyone gets shown the same picture. A crowd of sperm, tails going, all pointed the same way. Ahead of them one round thing, pale and enormous and entirely still. The story attached to it never varies either: millions set off, one arrives, he breaks through, and she is fertilised. It is a good story. It has a hero and an obstacle and a prize. It is also, in almost every particular, not what happens.

For a century we treated the ovary as a countdown clock that stops mattering at menopause. New research suggests it keeps working. It just changes jobs. A look at what the science actually shows, and what it doesn't.

I was six years old when a hospital diagnosed me with thalassemia. I was twenty-five when I found out. The file existed. The diagnosis existed. Nobody told me. That is not an accident of individual incompetence. It is the product of a medical system that was not built to look for answers in a body like mine. Here is what that system has cost — in missed diagnoses, in wrong doses, in avoidable deaths, and in the years between symptom and answer that millions of women are still living through right now.

I have always had a lot of fears. And since a young age I have been adamant about overcoming them. Not tiptoeing around them. Collecting them. Every time I collect one — every time I do the thing and survive it — something happens that still astounds me. How easy the second time is. How there is almost literally no stopping me. I always thought this was a mindset. It is not a mindset. It is fear extinction — and the female brain is specifically, hormonally primed for it at particular points in the cycle. Here is the science behind the thing that has helped me most.

A butterfly-shaped gland the size of a walnut controls your metabolism, heart rate, body temperature, brain, mood, hair, and menstrual cycle. When it goes wrong — and in women it goes wrong 200 times more often than in men — it goes wrong slowly. Quietly. In ways that medicine has spent decades attributing to stress, anxiety, age, and not sleeping enough.