Letter from Dana Shoenhard

We Need More Medical Research

Imagine you are a woman like me, late 50s, with a 13-year history of taking birth control to ensure you and your husband didn’t have 13 children. Your uterus is scarred with fibroids, some as wide as 5 cm, which prevents the ultrasound tech from being able to measure the lining reliably; therefore, they cannot tell if you have cancer without taking a biopsy.

Now imagine a pair of extremely sharp, sterilized scissors, 12 inches long. No local anesthesia is given while those very pointed scissors enter your body, are used to pry open the cervix muscle and applied against the back of your uterus wall—holding it in place so the biopsy can be taken. Barbaric. Extremely painful during the procedure.

During the following eight hours, ibuprofen could not erase the burning injury that my body was trying to repair. Simply standing up was torture. This procedure was only necessary because women’s healthcare is under-studied and my doctor required a cancer free report before prescribing hormone replacement therapy. We don’t even know how to prevent fibroids.

The ability to detect uterine cancer should have progressed beyond this method.

Have better instruments been devised for bonsai growing than women’s health? You should have seen the delicately curved ends of the scissors I saw at garden club this week, just to protect the bark of the mini tree. Ideally a blood test should detect it. Do we have that here? No, but the UK does.

Please, people, vote the Democrats back into office. We all need to support scientific research, which leads to better healthcare.

Dana Shoenhard
Cooperstown