Pain Proof

EP. 06

I have a medical condition that causes sudden, overwhelming pain. When it happens, all I can do is sit down and breathe.

But every time I talk to my doctors, my pain is dismissed and diminished (sound familiar?) Because the medical system has a long history of ignoring women’s pain, and that's especially true for black women and women of color.

Instead of keeping a pain log in my notes app like a normal human being... I built an app.

When I’m in that kind of pain, I can’t really think clearly. So I wanted just one button to click. You tap start, and it starts recording the time.

I made this super cute illustration of me and my dog, and it honestly calms me down to look at it. I animated it with CSS so that I can breathe with the illustration. Breathe in for 3 seconds, and breathe out for 3.

Then when the pain is over, I click the stop. A window pops up to ask if I'm on my period. Sometimes it's correlated, and sometimes it's not.

I answer by tapping a color (girls you get it). Now it records the event. Over time, the app turns those moments into a heat map. I can see how long the pain lasted on each day, and what was going on in my body at the time.

I didn’t build this to convince myself that my pain is real. I built it so the next time someone questions it, I don’t have to translate my experience into a number on a chart that was never meant for me.

I can just show the data.

If you’ve ever struggled to explain pain and felt dismissed, check out the demo!

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