Fed up, Bachmann started a local campaign in his home of Penticton, B.C., after garnering attention from a Facebook post lamenting the lack of spaces to change his son. The public response, says Bachmann, has been encouraging. He’s been invited to speak at a council meeting and says community members often stop him on the street to congratulate him for taking up the cause.

“I feel like I can make a difference,” says Bachmann.

Still, the oft-overlooked problem is proving slow to resolve. Meanwhile, south of the border, the issue is gaining traction, with the help of celebrity exposure from the likes of Ashton Kutcher. Shortly after becoming a father, Kutcher realized what many men and their families do and had the platform to draw mass attention to the issue.

And before leaving the White House, former president Barack Obama signed the Bathrooms Accessible in Every Situation Act, requiring all federal public buildings in the U.S. to install baby changing tables in both women’s and men’s washrooms within the next two years.

Canadians continue to push for their country to follow suit. This fight was recently taken up by six online petitions nationwide. Mississauga, Ont.’s Elizabeth Porto started a campaign for changes to be made to the building code in the province. She finds it discriminatory, especially when there is a change table in the women’s washroom and not the men’s in the same location. “Baby change tables in all Ontario restaurants or any other business required to have public washrooms should be a right, and not viewed as a courtesy,” Porto states in her call to action.

Indeed, there is no reason for spaces to assume the mother is always the one changing their child. The lack of changing spaces in male-designated bathrooms becomes even more problematic for same-sex dads, single dads, and transgender parents, who are constantly running into trouble finding a clean, safe place to change their children’s diapers. “Canada claims to be a world leader in the promotion of gender equality and human rights,” Porto notes. “If this is true, then let’s make the change.”

The Island of Books

An ode to books, Rhonda Mullins’s translation of Dominique Fortier’s The Island of Books captures the emotions of two struggling individuals hoping to find strength in writing. Told from the perspectives of an illiterate, grieving artist from the 15th century who becomes a monk and moves to the island commune of Mont Saint-Michel, and from a present-day novelist dealing with writer’s block, Mullins and Fortier weave between two tales while seamlessly interjecting facts about Mont Saint-Michel’s history. With each paragraph ending on such powerful sentences, there’s something profound about the writing style; the book exudes an aura of grandeur mimicking that of Mont Saint-Michel.

Barrelling Forward

Barrelling Forward, a debut short story collection by emerging Newfoundland writer Eva Crocker, presents compelling tales of the so-called “ordinary” within Canada. Through 14 pieces, readers are acquainted with intensely realistic descriptions of both personhood and setting. The chafing, itching skin of a man is delineated in the short story, “Dealing with Infestation.” And in the title piece, a long voyage through Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Montreal, and a rain storm is brought to life through goldfish crackers and triangular sandwiches. While Toronto’s characteristic diversity is more or less elided during Crocker’s descriptions of the city in “Auditioning,” Barrelling Forward is, overall, an intimate and fascinating read.

“Traditional, holistic treatment is much more successful in its outcome,” says Boshart, pointing out that physical symptoms often stem from underlying emotional challenges.

“Usually the root [of illness] is in the emotional or spiritual realm. You have to disentangle all these things to help rebuild people in a very broad and supportive way; it’s about healing not just about treating symptoms.”

Recently, Boshart travelled to North Dakota to join the Dakota Access Pipeline protest and offer her healing services. “I sat in a space called the emotional wellness teepee,” says Boshart. “We were there to support people in whichever way they needed.”

Joining a community of Western physicians, herbalists, chiropractors, and energy workers, Boshart discovered “the capacity of humans to come together in generosity, respect, and reciprocal relationships” and create a functioning multi-dimensional health care system.

It’s this type of blended model that she hopes to one day establish in her own community. “Ultimately, I want to see Indigenous people given back the power to take care of each other,” says Boshart.

“Every Canadian needs to educate themselves about the history of Indigenous issues, and be an ally in bringing us to a place where we can be well again,” she adds. “[The Indigenous community] has so much knowledge about how to work with the land and make our earth a better place, and if people aren’t well, they can’t share their gifts.”

Illustration by Valentine Smith.

One way to examine a marriage is to look at the pattern of jokes. Fourteen years ago, when Heidi started her daily running practice, when Marley was two, terribly two, Heidi used to joke that she ran because she could pretend she’d keep running and never come back. Sometimes she ran for an hour, for two. Jake laughed loudly, generously, and it was one of his best points. He could take a joke.

Her breaths were as loud as the rustling of leaves. Footsteps too heavy. Her breath a fog in the air, dirty as exhaust.

Last night, she’d gone to bed early. They’d had Dinah and Steve and Nathan over, and they were a little drunk, trying, a bunch of academic ex-radicals, to revel. Their parties were growing sluggish as their metabolisms. Talk now turned around aches and pains, ageism, the fact of death. “I’m going to die, me!” Dinah said. Dinah had recently gotten through a bout of breast cancer. “Riddled!” she said. “I’m riddled with disease.” Heidi had smiled. She’d been amused, slightly, but was already thinking forward to the morning, to her ritual in the still-dark world. Snug clothing thin as a rubber cast peeling up and over her body, her neon pink runners, the sweat-wicking socks. Yanking the laces hard. It was a place she could go to in her mind, down to the paved trails curving around the marsh called Cootes Paradise, down to the view of the lake, choppy and wild. The fishy smells, the dead things, skeletons recalling wasps’ nests when viewed from a long way off. Marley called it an addiction. Teenagers were prone to misusing words and exaggerating. Everything random, everything literally.

“I think the definition of addiction includes the possibility for ruin. Drugs and alcohol and gambling ruin people’s lives.”

“So drugs aren’t always so bad?” Marley was withering, eyebrows high, and Heidi suspected a trap, that she’d have to allow that hard drug use was okay. She skirted it.

“I don’t think my running’s an addiction.”

“You depend on it, Mom. You’re de-pend-ent.”

Sometimes at parties Jake still talked about her PhD, as though he worried about how people might view her. And Dinah talked and talked about cancer, about bodies.

Steve said, “I haven’t passed on my genetic material.”

“Maybe it all comes down to biology in the end,” Nathan said. None of them believed this, but they allowed it to pass unchallenged. A

s they talked, Heidi watched her husband, sexy because he would be inaccessible to her until afterwards. Married 20 years, they were now amazing to people. “I need a little more dysfunction in my life!”: one of Marley’s ridiculous complaints.

She got up to pour everyone more wine, to offer chocolates. In half an hour, she’d go to bed, armed with the excuse of her morning run. From upstairs, she would hear their voices faintly, the eruptions of laughter. Would hear when they decided to put on reggae, possibly to dance. Would hear Dinah say that she was running so much it was like she thought she wasn’t going to die. Soon it was only Dinah’s voice, and Jake’s. The words, the laughter, the drumbeats wound into her mind, while she fell by drowsy steps to sleep. Was that Dinah talking to Jake after the others had gone home? Was that them saying “her”? Over and and over again, her her her, scritch-scratching like branches hitting the window in a storm.

Heidi used to joke, when asked how they’d gotten together, “He was just so obsessed with me, I felt sorry for him.” Funny because Jake was so good looking. Funny because it had been she who’d been obsessed. “A marriage based on pity.”

Some years ago, there’d been a body right on the trail where she ran every day. It had been lying there in plain sight, decomposing, presumably with its unseeing eye or eyes staring right at Heidi as she breezed past. She read the paper for clues, brought it up in every casual conversation with neighbours, with parents dropping their kids off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon, with the woman who owns the bakery, with the librarians. It had been a calm, almost idyllic time in her life, with both kids in school and space in the day for walking by herself, stopping at the bookstore, treating herself to lattes. But in this body there seemed to be something personal, especially in the fact that she had missed it, a half-dressed woman, torso pricked with stab wounds, skin mottled and bruised and swollen, barely covered by leaves and pine needles.

She should have noticed something. A smell? Scavenging animals? She returned to her memory of the day when she would have run right past the body twice—once in, once back—and could not see anything where seeing the body should have been. It was all she talked about for a while. She joked about turning herself into the police for being such a bad detective. There was guilt in it, wasn’t there? A sin of omission?

The body had, while living, belonged to a student who lived around the corner from them. And when she racked her memory for this, too, she thought she almost remembered the girl’s long sweep of blonde hair, her slender body, glasses that appeared to be ornamental, but she knew that this picture in her mind came not from her own observations but from the newspaper, the neighbours’ reports.

Semen had been found on her person, semen eventually determined to have been deposited only an hour before her death. The rage indicated by the many stab wounds were said to be proof that she had been killed by someone she knew intimately. But there were no witnesses, no DNA matches.

A woman detective came by, claimed only to be making rounds. “I’m afraid these things rarely get resolved,” she told Heidi. Middle-aged, paunchy, but pretty in her way, she walked slowly around the living room, pausing at the teak bookshelves covering one large wall, pausing again to peer at photos and artworks sat here and there. “Call me if you think of anything,” she’d said, and there was a meaning to her look that Heidi understood was a police trick, an attempt to suss you out if there was anything to be sussed.

There were layers of years between her and those months of investigation, layers between the investigation and what had really happened, and she was only thinking of it now because of something Dinah had said last night. It was a bin you found in an attic full of things you’d forgotten existed.

Heidi no longer became breathless while running. More likely were her legs to give out than her lungs. Lately it was heel pain; the only time her foot didn’t hurt was when she was actually hitting the ground hard, silencing it, and then it whimpered through the rest of her day. She limped while walking; running, she flew.

The only way to survive those years when the kids were babies was to be like that heel, numb and silent, getting through. So that now she could not remember. She must have told Jake about the detective. Now it throbbed in her mind, a halo of light around the thing to which she should have been alert.

A year after the body was found, she’d become a cliché, the bored housewife imagining things. She could not find significance in the details. Her sympathy was with the police, dealing always with gaps and misarrangements of facts and— how could the justice system rely so heavily on eyewitness testimony?—human memory. “I think I’ll retire the detective’s cap,” she said to Jake one evening after dinner. “At the risk of becoming ridiculous.”

Jake had laughed. The table was strewn with dirty dishes, rice spread like maggots around Kent’s chair. She took him to the kitchen to wash the sticky soy sauce off his hands and said to Jake, “Was she ever in any of your classes?”

“Who?”

“Larissa Cheminovsky or however you pronounce it.”

“Oh, her.”

The Who?. The Oh, her. These responses made no sense in the context of their discussion. They sent a chill through her so that she thought, her hands on Kent’s, working the suds through his fat fingers, she might make her son shiver.

“Her.”

“I thought I told you that? She was in the first Sensationalist class I taught,” he said, boldly looking at her, a dare in his eyes.

***

Sometimes when she was running her body disappeared. She became spirit. Only her eyes floated in midair like two firebugs. Sometimes during a long run it was as if she’d fallen asleep.

It was as bad as an addiction. When she had to stop, it might ruin her. How could she go on without the way it felt? Running was a way of sorting the thoughts into their proper channels, sending them along like paper boats out to sea. Her body in leaps and falls, its acquaintance with gravity. An old joke about why she ran marathons, about why she insisted on giving birth without an epidural: “I have a guilty conscience.”

Running also made her see herself as prey. When she went down her trails, the wooded ones, the asphalt ones trimmed by the polluted, fish-stinking waterways, she was always alert. A branch falling along the path ahead of her felt ominous. Rustling sounds were wolves in her imagination. Once she had come across a pack of five enormous deer, and camouflaged as she was by her black Gore-Tex and the winter’s dark they didn’t notice her. From a distance and until she was a few metres away, she thought they were fantastical, too fine to be animals, and too large to be people.

Perhaps with her routine, her isolation, she was inviting rapists and weirdos. She didn’t stop running underneath overpasses, in absolute darkness, not even after the body was found.

***

Just before she’d said good-night, she gave an anecdote about running past the giant blow-up black cats someone had put on their lawn for Halloween. They were at least six-by-six-by-six feet large, and there two of them, rigged up to a motor so that they turned their giant grinning evil black cat faces toward each other and then forward and then toward each other. “It was terrifying to run past them,” she said. She felt judgment or boredom in the silence of her audience. “I don’t know how to explain it. My instincts flared. Obviously they were made out of nylon or whatever. But as I was running past them I felt distinctly like they were going to pounce on me.”

Distinctly was one of those words people used when they wanted to sound smart. It had been well over a decade since she’d given up her academic life. Dinah and Steve and Nathan stared at her, blinking.

It reminded Jake of something amusing that had happened. He could read her and a crowd, rescuing her from the limelight.

He told the anecdote about the squirrel, about their bad detective work. The joke was that his specialization was Sherlock Holmes and the 19th-century detective novel, that in his work he dealt with the detail, with clues, all the ways to think about the epistemological problem of everyday life.

“First, there was a hole in the screen. We found a huge gaping hole one day in the dining room window screen. We thought it was Kent!” Everyone laughed. “Just like Kent to punch a hole in the screen for no reason. And then the next day our fruit basket was knocked over. My first thought was—there’s been a burglar! What did he want with our fruit?” He was into the story now, standing. “There was an apple with some bites in it and of course I assumed it had to be Kent!”

“Tell me you did not eat the apple,” Steve said. He was famously fastidious, and grimaced largely for everyone’s amusement.

“Well, I cut out the bite marks.” Jake seemed quite far from her, and she smiled at him from another place, underwater. “Then, at dinner time, a squirrel comes along and sits on the windowsill and stares at us while we’re eating.”

“We really didn’t have a clue,” Heidi said. “I think I said ‘We need to cover up that hole or we’ll have wildlife getting in.’”

“We interrogated Kent and Marley: Why did you break the screen? We couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t just tell us the truth. We’re the worst detectives in the entire world! It wasn’t until we saw the squirrel sitting in our fucking nut jar that we finally put it together.”

“At least the irony isn’t lost on you,” Nathan said.

As she left the room with empty plates, and on her way back with another bottle, Heidi heard Dinah say something about Larissa. “Remember that whole thing?”

“Did they ever find the guy?” Steve said.

“Of course you assume it was a guy,” Dinah said.

“They never caught him,” Heidi said. They all stared. Everything always came blurting out of her.

“Wasn’t she in a bunch of your classes?” Dinah said to Jake.

“She was his RA,” Nathan said. Then they moved on to another discussion: the barrage of email, the problem of cell phones.

“I’m a hamster on a wheel,” Heidi said, by way of apologizing for leaving the room.

“Aren’t we all,” said Dinah.

***

In the morning, she ran the knots out of her mind. She thought them over like a surgeon, plucking them out as though they were tumours she was riddled with. What might it mean to live as though the irony weren’t lost on you? She thought again and again. What might it mean to live like someone upon whom nothing is lost?

She thought about the rice maggots, Kent’s hands under the water, Jake’s strange response. Oh, her. She’d been a student in more than one class, a chosen research assistant. His reaction had been a lie so easily deciphered that it was an insult as well as a dare. What had it meant? You never believed a person capable of cheating, let alone killing, let alone killing in such a gruesome way, but every killer had a family, had at least one friend who’d say: not the person I knew.

No. These were the thoughts of an irrational, a paranoiac, a conspiracy theorist. There was something there under the thoughts—something about her—but she ran around it, couldn’t dig.

As she neared the house, she saw him there on the porch.

“What are you doing?” she said, unable to look at him directly.

“What do you mean?”

“Standing vigil?” He had never been there to greet her, not once in all these years, but now it seemed to her that marriage as a form of guardianship was inescapable.

“Yeah, ha.” She didn’t need to look up from her stretch to know how his smile looked. “How’s your foot?”

“Same,” she said, pulling off the sock and digging her thumbs into the meat of her heel. You couldn’t see a person you’ve loved this long.

“Don’t let it cripple you,” he said. Then, he reached out his arm to help her up. “You’re allowed to take a day off, you know,” he said, eyes kind, smile relaxed. It was too easy to trust him. No, that was the wrong modifier. Just: it was easy enough to trust him.

Illustration by Matt Daley.

On February 9, 2016, at 3:45 p.m., Gail Benshabat sent a text to her 27-year-old daughter, Lisa, asking if she wanted to catch an early movie. Benshabat was wrapping up her workday at a quiet special needs school in the north end of Toronto, about a 30-minute drive from the third-floor apartment where she lived with her daughter.

Lisa never texted back.

“I knew something was wrong,” Benshabat recalls. She returned home and rushed up a flight of stairs with an immediacy only a mother can know, calling out Lisa’s name. With no response, she put her bag down and rounded the corner of her kitchen into her daughter’s bedroom down the end of the hallway. Lisa was hanging lifeless from the ceiling fan in her room.

Lisa left three letters for her loved ones: one to Benshabat, one to her older sister, and one to her extended family and friends. “Mom,” she wrote on the first of five pages, “I want you to know that you did everything you could to help me and more…. I couldn’t have gotten this far in life without your endless love and support. At this point you can tell that I lost hope that I would ever get better.”

Lisa suffered from interstitial cystitis (IC), a little-known medical condition characterized by chronic pelvic pain and a heavy pressure in the bladder and pelvic region, often associated with urinary frequency and urgency. It manifests in sharp, shooting pain, pressure, or spasms in the bladder, pelvic region, and lower back. It has been likened to carrying a bowling ball with knives in it.

IC currently has no known cause or treatment. It is also tremendously difficult to diagnose because its symptoms mimic other conditions. It’s not unusual for a diagnosis to take up to 10 years.

The pain of the illness—a pain that has been classified by some doctors as being worse than bladder cancer—was wreaking havoc on Lisa’s life. She felt she had frequency to urinate more than the average person. But doctors said there was little they could do. Even after her death, the message was repeated. On the night of Lisa’s funeral, Benshabat woke up at 3 a.m. and started writing emails and letters to the doctors who cared for her daughter. Many replied offering their sympathies; yet, one psychiatrist responded with his condolences but still suggested that Lisa’s pain was all in her head.

This is a common theme for many female chronic pain sufferers: their symptoms are dismissed as psychosomatic despite studies and tests confirming the opposite. According to a report in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics in 2001, “women who seek help are less likely than men to be taken seriously when they report pain and are less likely to have their pain adequately treated,” the researchers conclude. These findings have been repeated in medical journals in several years since.

It’s not uncommon for women with marginalized illnesses like IC to feel hopeless, even suicidal. It’s why chronic pain patients—often women—attempt suicide four times more than the general population, and why suicidal ideation is three to four times higher in IC sufferers. Even in a field that has been criticized as sexist for decades, doctors continue to perpetuate stigma against women—and for chronic pain sufferers like Lisa, that can often be the difference between life and death.

***

There were few years in Lisa’s young adulthood that weren’t plagued by constant pain. She found some relief in 2001 when, after Benshabat took to the internet to conduct personal research on IC, she found a urologist in Toronto who would prescribe the pain medication Pyridium. The pills relieved the bulk of Lisa’s symptoms for a couple months when she was 12 and again when she was 24, but she still experienced intermittent pain, spasms, and urinary urgency. Unsure when the symptoms would hit, she slept in until noon most days hoping to avoid a longer day of pain.

Many doctors dismissed Lisa. After waiting for months for an appointment with a Toronto IC specialist, she was told the pain was nerve related and there was nothing to be done. Another specialist in St. Catharines, Ont. offered no hope.

Then, a female doctor at Women’s College Hospital gave her some hope, conducting her own voiding test in her office. “It is not in your head, Lisa,” the doctor confirmed. Finally, someone set the record straight. For the first time ever, a doctor confirmed what Benshabat and Lisa knew all along: her pain was real.

Desperate, Benshabat and Lisa turned to a doctor at Toronto Western Hospital to insert a sacral neuromodulator, a surgically implanted device that sends out mild electrical pulses to the nerves in the lower back. The device helps people with urinary function and with chronic pain. But it doesn’t help everyone.

By her 24th birthday, Lisa had seen the inside of more than 10 specialists’ offices across North America—and no one could stop her ongoing physical agony

“It took us some time to persuade [the urologist] to try out the sacral neuromodulator,” Benshabat says. Eventually, he agreed. But after two weeks, Lisa noticed that there was no change to her symptoms and asked that it be removed. Postsurgery, as Lisa was wheeled into the recovery room, tears streamed down her face from the pain she was experiencing. The doctor turned to her. “I don’t know what else I can do for you,” he said and promptly left the room. There was a look of horror and outrage on the attending nurse’s face. “She went to bat for us,” Benshabat says.

When Lisa and her mother left the hospital that day, Benshabat “filed that bad experience away at the back of my mind. Our hopes were shattered,” she says. “I wanted to file a complaint to the hospital but at this juncture I needed all the strength to keep Lisa’s hopes up.”

Benshabat and her daughter did not stop searching for relief. In 2014, Lisa visited pain clinics, received more medication. She had MRIs and CAT scans. She was tested for EhlersDanlos, a connective tissue disorder, but a geneticist ruled it out. She saw physiotherapists, naturopaths, acupuncturists, and an osteopath.

By her 24th birthday, Lisa had seen the inside of more than 10 specialists’ offices across North America—and no one could stop her ongoing physical agony.

There were still options. Benshabat encouraged Lisa to keep trying. There was a doctor in Kitchener, Ont., who offered up bladder instillations, a cocktail of medicines that are put into the bladder directly. The same doctor’s research assistant encouraged Lisa to take part in their clinical trial for a new IC medication. Lisa declined: she wanted immediate relief, not a trial. The research assistant was disappointed. “You know some people with IC take their lives,” she told Benshabat.

Benshabat kept searching. She found a highly recommended physiotherapist in Kitchener with remarkable results in relaxing pelvic floor muscles. Later, she came across an IC specialist in Michigan, a three-hour drive away, but a date mix-up made Lisa miss the appointment. It wasn’t rescheduled.

“We didn’t want to overdo it,” Benshabat says. “So many doctors were all repeating the same story: It’s a disease that is not well understood and that they don’t know enough about.”

Fifteen years after her first experience with pelvic and bladder pain, with no answers on the horizon for how to live a normal, pain-free life, Lisa gave up.

***

Lisa’s experience is not singular, and gender biases remain glaringly common in North American physicians’ offices, the ER, and medical research—regardless of the ample studies highlighting the problem. While an estimated one-tenth of Canadians under 44 experience chronic pain, a disproportionate number of sufferers are female.

Yet, according to “Relieving Pain in America,” a 2011 report published by the Institute of Medicine on the public health impact of chronic pain, women’s reports of pain were more likely to be dismissed. Joe Fassler’s eye-opening essay for The Atlantic in 2015 details this through the story of his wife Rachel and her dismissive experience in a Brooklyn, New York emergency room department. Nurses frequently told her to stop crying from the pain—a pain that was the result of a twisted fallopian tube that her attending physician misdiagnosed as kidney stones because he didn’t check the tests before finishing his shift.

Rachel’s experience recalls the “Yentl Syndrome,” a term coined in a 1991 academic paper by Bernadine Healy, noting that women do not receive aggressive or proactive treatment in their initial encounters with the health care system until they “prove that they are as sick as male patients.” The study was named after the 1983 film Yentl starring Barbra Streisand, whose character dresses up as a boy in order to receive the education she desires. Healy found that men were often expedited and taken more seriously than women when treating cardiovascular complaints.

Later, in 2014, Katarina Hamberg, a researcher out of Sweden’s Umea University, found “women are less likely than men to receive more advanced diagnostic and therapeutic interventions” for coronary artery disease, Parkinson’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, neck pain, knee joint arthritis, and tuberculosis—all chronic illnesses—even when they presented with the same severity of symptoms as their male counterparts.

For Abigail, an artist from Kingston, Ont., suffering with endometriosis, it’s a familiar story. Abigail, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, suffered debilitating menstrual cramps since the age of 14. Her first doctor dismissed her suggestion it was endometriosis, another chronic and hard-to-diagnose disease that manifests in severe menstrual cramps and gut-wrenching pain; she was instead prescribed Midol, a medication billed to help menstrual pain, and Ibuprofen. The pills made a small difference.

But in 1999, Abigail collapsed from excruciating menstrual cramps during her first day on a new job in Toronto. The emergency room doctor she saw said it was a common ailment. “This is part of being a woman,” he said. He prescribed Ponstan, a muscle relaxant, which Abigail would use religiously for the next decade.

It would take almost two decades before Abigail was diagnosed with endometriosis. Like Lisa, she found herself turned away by doctors who dismissed her pain, or pumped her full of pills and antibiotics that failed to relieve her. In 2005, she was hopeful when a gynecologist in Montreal discovered a dermoid cyst on her ovary and scheduled surgery to remove it; but during the procedure, the doctor was unable to do so without also removing her ovary. Without Abigail’s consent, the cyst was left alone.

Her pain never subsided. Following the surgery, she emailed the gynecologist a succinct list of detailed dates and pain recurrence since the surgery, along with a rational fear it could be symptoms of ovarian cancer. He wrote back: “Blah, blah, blah. Contact the receptionist for an appointment.” Abigail descended into a depression. “I thought I was going mad because no doctor could explain what was causing the pain,” she says.

Abigail and Lisa aren’t alone. Writer Olivia Goldhill from New York had to self-diagnose endometriosis after her primary care doctor “waved his hands dismissively” when she asked if her pelvic pain could be connected to her menstrual cycle. And Sarah Barmak, in her 2016 book Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality, cites a similar story from Vanessa, a woman who went from having multiple orgasms to experiencing intense pain during sex. She was told by doctors, who were unable to successfully treat Vanessa, to “just not have sex” as a means to cure troubling uterine pain. Barmak doubts a man would be offered similar advice.

***

Are doctors dismissing pain in women because they themselves cannot find an answer?

A majority of those suffering from chronic pain are women, and often, their disorders are not easily understood by the medical establishment. This is due in part to a lack of funding and research available.

An editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine explains menstruating women are “being excluded from clinical trials, and that when they are included, they’re tested early in their menstrual cycles, when their hormone levels are closest to men’s.” And according to Julie Palmer, a researcher at Boston University, it’s still easier to recruit male test patients for some disorders, leaving women behind.

Meanwhile, some studies lay the blame on women and their inability to communicate efficiently with doctors. The University of California, Davis’s Michael Moskowitz says men are better able to voice their pain symptoms in ways doctors can respond to. Sweden’s Hamberg echoes this, noting that “men describe their symptoms in a straightforward and demanding way, while women often… give vague symptom descriptions and hesitate to accept potentially dangerous measures such as surgery.”

And even though female chronic pain patients outnumber male chronic pain patients, there are more male pain physicians than female pain physicians in North America. Because women experience pain more intensely, more frequently, and respond differently to pain medication and pain management therapies, male doctors may have trouble understanding their symptoms.

Abigail, like many, is still at odds with how little her doctors could assist her. When asked how the doctors came to diagnose her in 2013, she said there was “always a lack of information”—all of her doctors would consult a massive tome of pharmacology to diagnose the symptoms, but none of the medications they prescribed helped completely. Despite the numerous conferences, newsletters, and medical journals available to keep doctors in the loop surrounding diagnoses and available treatments, there is no guarantee specialists are always up-to-date.

The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada says a subspecialty of Pain Medicine was approved in October 2010 and new national standards were implemented effective July 2013—meaning more research and treatment for chronic pain sufferers could be imminent. Senior communications specialist Melissa Nisbett, however, can’t confirm that there is a central database or online forum for doctors to consult for puzzling and seemingly incurable symptoms.

Desperate for answers, many, like Benshabat, turn to the internet, joining forums for support and searching for more understanding specialists abroad. Others simply linger in pain. As Carolyn Reilly, a reproductive justice advocate who suffers from endometriosis, writes in an article for Bitch magazine, something must change. “Female pain exists in a crossroad of stigma, disbelief, and misogyny. Female pain must be regarded as legitimate,” she says. “Because disbelieving and delegitimizing female pain is a form of oppression.”

***

When Lisa gave up her fight against IC, Benshabat felt responsible to keep searching for answers. More than a year since Lisa’s death, she is carrying on her daughter’s legacy by creating more awareness surrounding IC and those suffering with chronic pain, participating in talks at Canadian universities about the emotional impact of IC. She is also attending international conferences in the U.S. to share Lisa’s story with others.

“There is a moral responsibility by our medical system to turn their sights toward people who are giving up on life,” Benshabat adds. “I don’t want anyone to have to suffer like my daughter had to.”

These days, Benshabat often thinks back to the letter Lisa left for her. She is reminded of her daughter’s loss of hope, of the years in doctors’ offices that left her feeling defeated.

In the end, Benshabat’s efforts are calls for restored hope—that someday, Canadian women suffering with chronic pain, just like Lisa, will be treated with more respect and dignity by the health care providers intended to help them feel better.

The Water Beetles

At times graphic and disturbing, The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan tells the heroic and poetic story of a young boy living in Hong Kong during the Second World War. Based loosely on the diaries and stories of Kaan’s father, the narrative follows 12-year-old Chung-Man as his prestigious family is reduced to shambles. Along with his siblings, Chung-Man is forced to leave his home, travelling on foot to find safety. The book seamlessly flips between present day and the war, with the narrator shedding insight on how the war affected him after all those years. Along the way, the young boy faces the horrific realities of war. However, Kaan is able to balance the bloodshed with beautiful imagery and detail.

I make myself a moon calendar, the lunar cycle no more or
less important to me than checking David Levithan’s Lover’s
Dictionary Twitter feed to use as a horoscope.
I write myself a moon calendar and it goes: bullshit moon,
stupid stupid ugh moon, kill me now moon; go outside and look
at the star things, nerd out on the Internet bc planets, twinkly
star important moon*.
I send Mark a link to a thing about astronomy that I don’t
understand myself and it changes his life, so that’s good.
I load the stream myself and am sure I hear aliens.

There were trips to space and there were not trips to space;
there was the solar system, but then we failed it.
We kept ending and ending; the blankets got heavier and the air
got colder and you wanted me to confess
that I’d tricked you all along,
but had I?

I confessed that you couldn’t scare me away, couldn’t break
me away, that you and your fucking up and fucking up again
couldn’t do that.
You were scared, you said.
I left for space
and you for your sister’s,
We all have the places we go.

We found each other on my porch eventually
the last tenant’s peach patterned sofa cushions on knotted
frames, letting us imagine we were only visiting this.
My holey heart couldn’t handle it anymore, and couldn’t not
handle it.
Sun-bleached brown wicker snapping between our fingers, our
fingers intertwined like wicker about to snap.

What if Love Existed but You Didn’t Have Your Notification Settings Turned On?

If a relationship happened, but one party fell off the face of
the earth, did it make a sound? Was it a gasp or a scream?
Was it allowed to cry or told it was being selfish? Did it use
buzzwords?

If a person fell off of an earth but another person loved them,
did they really leave? If they didn’t leave, did they ever exist? Is
time?

If there was love, and it was Sunday, was there baseball? Was
there crying in baseball? Did anyone show up on time? Did they
skate in the winter? Did they fuck in the community garden?
Did they think about it? Was it too cold? If they did not fuck in
the community garden, did it make a sound? Was it a gasp or a
scream? Is there an option D? Did you love back? Was love?

If a relationship happened, but one party fell off the face of the
earth?
Was the earth love? Was falling? Was soil? Was traffic? Was a
face? Was your face love? It was to me.

Here’s the question at the heart of it: Should we be worried about radioactive waste leaching into the Great Lakes? Absolutely we should, notes a coalition of 110 Canadian and American environmental groups. For a year they’ve been calling on both governments to reduce what they believe are the harmful ramifications of radioactive isotopes in humans.

Gauging the extent of nuclear contamination in the Great Lakes is daunting. Yet a report released in March 2016 by the Canadian Environmental Law Association proposed a simple solution: List radionuclides, a form of unstable radioactive atom, as a “chemical of mutual concern” under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. By listing the radioactive agent as one to watch, Ottawa and Washington would commit themselves to understanding the severity of the problem, all while developing control strategies to reduce any hazardous ecological or health impacts.

Since 1972, Canada and the United States jointly agreed to restore and maintain the “chemical, physical, and biological integrity” of the Great Lakes. And in May 2016, both countries released the first set of eight chemicals they committed to monitor. Some usual suspects—mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls—were included alongside newcomer flame retardants and acids.

Radionuclides didn’t make the cut, an oversight that means “the most comprehensive environmental monitoring program for the lakes” cannot be applied to them, Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) head Theresa McClenaghan said at the time.

Known as isotopes, radionuclides emit energy as radiation as they seek stability. This speeds their decay; while some deteriorate rapidly, other isotopes remain in an environment for millions of years. It’s the power of this breakdown that allows radionuclides to damage living tissue, causing lung and bone cancer, mutated DNA, birth defects, and leukemia.

While radionuclides do exist organically in the Great Lakes region (most commonly from uranium, used in nuclear fuel), it is human activity that’s made the basin a “hot-bed for nuclear-related activity,” notes John Jackson, CELA director and the report’s lead author.

More than 30 pieces of nuclear infrastructure have been built around the four lower Great Lakes over the past six decades. Uranium mines, nuclear waste sites, power plants—all brought dangerous elements to the province’s radioactive mix. Iodine-129, one isotope commonly used in Ontario in nuclear fuel bundles, has a half-life of 15.7 million years; it’s also known to destroy thyroids.

Cumulative impacts matter. Any new addition of radionuclides to the Great Lakes, however small, Jackson notes, compounds the effects of harmful isotopes already present. And unlike rivers or oceans where water turnover happens quickly, the Great Lakes are a relatively closed system. Lake Superior, for example, needs almost two centuries to replace its water, trapping damaging radionuclides for generations.

Mark Mattson, head of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, told current events show The Agenda late last year that nowhere else on Earth is the same water that’s needed to cool nuclear facilities also used by 45 million people for drinking water. That’s a dangerous anomaly that should give everyone pause. “We don’t have extra-special protections that I think are warranted given how much we rely on the Great Lakes,” he said.

Not everyone agrees that radionuclides are a clear danger. David Shoesmith, the Industrial Research Chair in the University of Western Ontario’s chemistry department (a position funded in part by nuclear operator Ontario Power Generation), says there is “no reason whatsoever” for Ottawa and Washington to list radionuclides as a chemical of mutual concern.

Their presence in the Great Lakes is insignificant, Shoesmith tells me. “The only sources for significant levels of radionuclides in that water would be from whatever nuclear reactors there are on the shoreline,” he said. “And whatever they emit, which would be incredibly small if anything at all, would be already noted and dealt with” by power producers and regulated by a host of monitors as mandated by federal and international law.

“Radioactivity is a fact of life whether we want to think about it or not,” Shoesmith adds. And the chance of radionuclides escaping from a nuclear facility “is as close to zero as we can guarantee.”

Despite this, why choose to stifle our knowledge of and ability to act on the danger of something as grave as nuclear waste in our drinking water? Listing radionuclides as a chemical of mutual concern upholds the spirit (and the legal obligations) of the Water Quality Agreement that Canada and America signed back in ’72. And, more critically, such a move could make both countries better informed of nuclear power’s potential pitfalls. This is crucial at a time when we’re debating nuclear licence renewal in Ontario and deciding what underground reservoir will have the dubious honour of housing some of the 37 million kilograms of nuclear waste currently sitting in storage cells across the province.

“There is no level of radionuclides below which exposure can be defined as ‘safe,’” Jackson notes ominously in his report. He’s right. And while Shoesmith’s point that radioactivity is a fact of life is well taken, our overwhelming reliance on the Great Lakes to sustain the lives of millions residing in the basin trumps any call for complacency. After all, we were reckless in situating nuclear power plants deep in the belly of Canada’s most populous province. Let’s at least be bold in knowing the dangers we face.

Photo by Aimo Paniloo.

Imagine a teenager, face smeared in soot and red and white paint, summoning the crowd to its feet. This was the breathtaking scene at Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s pep rally in the 1990s.

Pep rallies, stirring and spirited as they are, don’t immediately evoke images of overtly political, much less radical, acts. But for Williamson Bathory, a celebrated Inuit performance artist, any space with an audience can be transformed.

With a roaring energy, she would perform uaajeerneq, a Greenlandic mask dance that invokes the power of storytelling, before a field of football players and fellow classmates. It was “in-your-face racism” meets uaajeerneq, an unnerving and moving performance, with its heavy use of sweeping movements and contorted expressions that seem to channel the unhinged— and comical—side of humanity. For Williamson Bathory, dancing became a way to “level the playing field.”

In her hands, uaajeerneq knows no boundaries: It embodies the frustrations, hopes, and ambitions that preoccupy Indigenous communities. Though her days performing at pep rallies are over, she continues to elevate all these raw emotions into national consciousness.

From appearing in “Retribution,” a music video by award-winning Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, to running workshops at schools on sexual health and the environment, Williamson Bathory commands any stage with her liberating interpretation of uaajeerneq.

In “Retribution,” Tagaq and Williamson Bathory’s performance grapples with humanity’s contentious relationship with the environment, reckons with the road to reconciliation, slays stereotypes, and brings focus to the unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The privilege of having a broad, increasingly visible platform to share her work has connected her to the works of other emerging artists on the cusp of “getting to know themselves,” Williamson Bathory says.

In Timiga, Nunalu Sikulu (My body, the land and the ice), a glacially paced video that both meditates on the silent beauty of the Arctic and upends stereotypes, Williamson Bathory gives a new layer of meaning to the body-positive movement by baring it all. Nudity for Inuit in Greenland—and many elders in Nunavut—wasn’t shameful, but was embraced with a healthy sense of humour and pride. In fact, when she started having children, Williamson Bathory’s mother said, “Welcome to your accordion years.” Only in recent years have the Inuit grown shy about their body.

Revealing every scar, every fold is a political act, an act of decolonization, Williamson Bathory says: “It’s an uncovering to help with the hurt so many Inuit feel about their bodies— an offering of healing.”

That’s just one of the many lessons her parents imparted. Williamson Bathory’s upbringing involved plenty of exposure to her Inuit roots.

Photos by Jamie Griffiths.

And though her ancestors hailed from Greenland, she can trace her lineage to a physical map of Canada. Random fate and artificial lines, which were drawn to carve out the country into discrete provinces and territories, played a part in bringing Williamson Bathory’s parents together.

On a whim, her mother, living in Greenland, ended up in Canada to chase the opportunity to connect with other First Nations students. “[My mother] felt that Greenland was very focused on its relationship with Denmark. She wanted to be in touch with other Indigenous people in the world,” she says. “She pointed at a map of Canada and found Saskatoon.”

With a little digging, her mother, studying to become a teacher at the time, discovered that the University of Saskatchewan had a program designed to prepare its First Nations students to tackle the challenges facing the next generation. That prompted her to transfer, where she ended up meeting Williamson Bathory’s late father.

Her father may have been English, but the entire family spoke Inuktitut at home. Still, Williamson Bathory believes that art can be a path to reclaiming tradition for those who can’t speak their mother tongue. “What we find is if you are a young person who may not speak Inuktitut fluently,” Williamson Bathory says, “it is through music, through creative ideas, that you get excited to learn more.”

For Williamson Bathory, it was through her mother, along with Maariu Olsen, an influential performance artist, that she learned uaajeerneq, when she was 13 years old.

The success Williamson Bathory enjoys now is the product of years of grit and persistence on the front lines, engaging her community through art. After years as a volunteer-run operation, Qaggiavuut Arts Society in Iqaluit, Nunavut—where Williamson Bathory is the program manager—is making strides to realize its dream of creating a hub for artists to collaborate and pass down their craft to the next generation.

Last year, Qaggiavuut secured a total of $1 million in funding through a series of grants, which enabled it to rent out space for an office and community programming. The plan is to have a dedicated building to run its mandate out of. Until then, much of the art that emerges comes from “people’s living rooms, overcrowded houses, shacks heated by oil stoves,” she says.

Still, with a jump-start in funding, Williamson Bathory can simultaneously devote more time to her art and activism to tell the stories of her community.

“To be able to tell our own stories, with our own bodies is an incredible feeling of purpose,” Williamson Bathory says. “It’s really important for young people to see that. I don’t see myself as someone who is dictating an agenda. I really feel like I’m a part of a movement.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Williamson Bathory attended high school in the 1980s, not the ’90s. Since publication, her title has also changed at Qaggiavut Arts Society. The story has since been updated. This regrets the errors.