For a long time the word I used was fine. Not well — I was never consistently well — but fine. The kind of fine that gets you through appointments where the doctor says your bloods look good and you nod and go home. The framework I eventually found — not in a clinic but in research papers — was low-grade inflammation. Chronic, systemic, subclinical. Below the threshold that conventional medicine calls concerning. Running quietly enough to be easy to miss. Pervasive enough to affect almost every system in the body.

What happens when you live with a rare blood disorder for 28 years… and are still being dismissed without even so much of a phone call?

This is a personal story, but also a systemic one. About gender bias in medicine, diagnostic delay, and what it does to women over time.