The Research Gap

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.