What the Waiting Room at CFHL Taught Me About Believing Women

I keep thinking about a girl I never met, pieced together from enough different women's stories that I can't point to one and say her, that's who I mean. Some of the details have been changed, and others belong to different people. She's not one person. She's the shape the story has taken after I've heard versions of it often enough that I finally needed to write it down instead of continuing to carry it around.

I should say plainly why this one is mine to write, and not just something I observed from a safe distance. I am not a stranger to any of this. My own family deals with it on a daily basis, and I have watched this exact pattern happen inside my own house, not just across a desk from patients. Here's the part that still bothers me: I've run a healthcare organization for a long time, and it still took years for the people I love most to get the right word for what was happening to them. I assumed that knowing how the system worked from the inside would make it move faster for us. It didn't. If anything, believing I could navigate it better than most people kept me from noticing how lost we already were, and that assumption cost us time I can't get back.

Why are There so Many Different Names For Pain?

She's maybe nineteen. She's been in some kind of pain since she was fourteen, and for five years that pain had a dozen different names depending on who she was talking to. Anxiety. Stress. A sensitive stomach. Something she'd grow out of. She kept a heating pad in her school locker for four years, plugged in behind the winter coats nobody else needed, and got good at explaining it away before anyone asked twice. Not because anyone treating her stopped caring. Endometriosis is genuinely hard to catch early. The symptoms overlap with a dozen other conditions, women's pain research has been neglected for decades, and most providers get a fraction of the training on it the condition deserves. Nobody sat down and decided to make her wait five years. Five years is just what a diagnostic gap that size looks like when it lands on one person and follows her from appointment to appointment.

By the time somebody finally said endometriosis out loud to her, she'd already stopped trusting her own body's alarm system. That might be the part that stays with me most, more than the physical pain, which is real and awful and worth its own essay. Years of being told your pain isn't what you think it is will eventually make you doubt the pain itself. In this version of the story, she keeps a diary of her symptoms because she no longer trusts herself to remember them accurately. Her memory was never the problem. She'd been corrected enough times that writing everything down felt safer than believing herself. That's not a physical health problem anymore at that point. That's what happens when decades of missing research and thin training finally come to rest on one person's shoulders, until she starts carrying the system's uncertainty like it's a flaw in her.

I think about her when I walk through the Center for Healthy Living, which I try to do more than my calendar wants to let me. There's a waiting room there that most people would walk past without a second look. Chairs, some art on the walls, the hum of a clinic doing its work. But I've never once walked into that room and felt nothing. Something in it has been amazing since the day it opened, and I don't think it has anything to do with the chairs.

There's something in that space I can feel before I can explain it. The closest I can get is that it's what years of a community caring for itself starts to feel like once it settles into the walls. On a good day, walk in and something in the room seems to say it before anyone opens their mouth. We've got you. We believe you. I want to be honest that it isn't a good day every day. There are appointments running long, providers stretched thinner than I'd like, and I'm sure there are women who've walked out of that building feeling less believed than they deserved. I don't want to write past that just because the rest of the piece needed a cleaner shape.

I've watched women sit in that space and let their shoulders come down from around their ears, in real time, in a way I don't think they even notice happening. I've watched a woman finish a session and just sit in the parking lot afterward before driving anywhere, like she needed a minute to be a person again before she went back to being everybody's mother, employee, and afterthought.

I don't get to know most of their stories, and that costs me more than I expected it to. I am a person who wants the whole story, always have been, and there is a version of me that would happily sit down with every one of them and just listen for an hour. But their privacy belongs to them, not to me, and my wanting to know doesn't change that. So I do the harder thing instead. I notice what I'm allowed to notice, from a respectful distance, and I trust the people in the room with them to carry the rest.

But I get to see the accumulated weight lift half an inch at a time, week after week, in people who came in not trusting that anyone in a white coat would actually listen this time. And I think that's the real thing we're building at CFHL, underneath the org chart and the grant reports and the clinical designations nobody outside healthcare has ever heard of. We are building a room where somebody's pain gets believed on the first telling instead of the fifth.

Healthcare in One Place

Right now, CFHL only holds behavioral health. Phase two is already under construction, and by Christmas the same building will hold medical and dental too. That matters more than it sounds like it should. It means a woman won't have to explain her pain to one set of strangers in one building and then explain what that pain has been doing to her mind to a completely different set of strangers across town. It means the exam room and the room where she finally says out loud how much this has cost her can sit down the same hallway from each other. We are not there yet. We will be soon, and I think about that every time I walk past what is currently just framing and drywall.

Believing somebody when she says she's hurting is a low bar. It shouldn't be a service line or an innovation. It should just be the beginning of care. Still, I'm proud when we clear it, because I've watched how high that supposedly low bar remains for a lot of the women who walk through our doors.

I don't know what happened to the girl I'm describing, because she isn't one girl, she's an average of too many. I know what I want to have happened. I want her sitting in a waiting room like the one at CFHL, where somebody writes down what she says instead of what they assume, and never makes her earn belief by saying it five times over. I want her keeping that symptom diary not because she doubts herself, but because she's finally working with people who take it seriously enough to read it.

We are not all the way there. I want to be honest about that instead of writing you a tidier ending than the one we've earned. Rural behavioral health is underfunded everywhere, women's pain still gets minimized in exam rooms across this entire country, and I could list the barriers for another thousand words without closing a single one of them today. But I keep coming back to that parking lot, and the woman sitting alone in her car for an extra minute. Nothing has been cured. The system hasn't been repaired, and tomorrow still holds whatever was waiting for her before she walked in. But for that hour, nobody tried to talk her out of her own pain. I think that's what building toward something amazing actually looks like from the inside, most days: not a launch event, not a press release, just one hour where somebody finally got believed.

I don't know how long this road is. I know I'm not stepping off it. Some of what we're building I'll get to see finished. Some of it I'm building for whoever is still walking this hallway long after I'm gone. Either way, I'm staying until it's done.

Mike Baker, CEO

Heritage Health