Last month, I saw an image of my brain.

On the 29th of December, I took myself off to the emergency room after a blinding headache lit up my forehead. The pain was off the charts - I tried to describe it in the audio essay I did for this week’s episode.

I went to my closest emergency room. It’s the kind of facility where you wonder if you’re just not better off at home, but I stayed the course, eventually spending about seven hours there. At the ER, I developed a sudden sensitivity to light, and by this time I had a dull throbbing in my head. They put me through a CT scan, and an hour later, the scan results came in clear - no brain tumor or bleeding.

Sitting upright in a chair in that tiny uncomfortable, overcrowded waiting room, I was given fluids intravenously and two Tylenol tabs.

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My left arm with the needle in it had to be kept still, so with my right hand, I typed out the words for a Google search on my phone. I know - Googling, while at the ER 😵‍💫

Was it an ‘icepick’ headache? A ‘thunderclap’ headache? Was it hormone-related? Could it be related to my worsening eyesight? The pinched nerve in my neck?

Neither Google nor the ER folks had answers.

They informed me that they wouldn't give a diagnosis, but that instead, I would have to follow up with a neurologist and get an MRI. All they could tell me was that I would live to fight another day. If the headache returned, they said, I should come straight back to the ER and report ‘the worst headache I’ve ever had’ so that triage would be sped up.

Since that day, two women I’ve talked to - good friends - have let me know they’ve had similar headaches at some point, and that no-one has been able to tell them much about it.

Pain is a theme that shows up so frequently on Overlooked - a thread that gets pulled throughout, season after season. This year I’m going to deal with pain as a topic in a more direct way on the show, and not just because of my personal experience.

​Cait Reeves in the adenomyosis episode talked about what language we use to express our pain. Gabrielle Jackson did on the endo episode as well. Shalene Gupta talked about pain during PMDD, and Carine Carmy even ended up in an ER after an IUD insertion. ​

And of course while I was in the throes of this headache, I thought about my friend Alicia, who had a ‘thunderclap’ headache that turned out to be an aneurysm, and my other friend Sally, who described the worst migraine symptoms ever. ​

I’ve held back from asking deeper and more specific questions about pain because I too, took women's pain for granted.

For future episodes of Overlooked, I’ll look at how we express and measure it, what we know about it and how we treat it. Pain in women’s health is an enormous, overwhelming and extraordinary topic and I’m fired up to take a closer look at it. I want to hear your pain story, and your questions about pain, so please just click reply on this email if you have something to share.

I have a neurologist appointment booked, and for now I’m really taking care of myself much better, and so far so good.

Some other news about Overlooked: today's episode is our 50th - a milestone I never thought I'd reach to be honest, but really so grateful for your support in getting here. And in 2026, there's a big change for the show: we’re releasing episodes every other week, so there’s lots more to come.
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Wishing you the best of health,
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Golda