There's something particular about the moment you find out the condition you've been living with was named after a feature it doesn't even reliably have. This week, after 14 years of global collaboration and the voices of more than 22,000 patients and clinicians, that got corrected. PCOS is now PMOS — and the name change is a window into something much bigger than terminology.

I remember the first time I understood that my migraines had a pattern. Four months of tracking in a notes app, and the dates kept clustering around the same point in the month. Always the days just before my period. Nobody had told me this was a thing — not a doctor, not a neurologist, not the pharmacists I had consulted about whether I was taking too much ibuprofen. I had spent years treating each migraine as an isolated event. A failure of hydration. A punishment for the glass of wine. I had a list of suspected causes as long as my arm, and not one of them said: your estrogen just dropped and your trigeminal nerve is reacting. This is that explanation.