Why I started this

I'm asking you to tell me something personal. It seems only fair that I go first.

My period was never normal. Through my teens it was written off as hormones, something I'd grow out of, and I was put on birth control. I stayed on it into my mid twenties without anyone looking much further.

Then I got married, and everything changed. The pain became something else entirely. One of the worst episodes came just after our honeymoon, the kind of pain where you stop being able to explain it to people.

When I finally got answers, they came fast and all at once: PCOS, and adenomyosis, confirmed after a hysteroscopy. The advice was to start trying immediately. So we did. We tried timed intercourse. I got second opinions, and third ones. We pursued IVF. And after all of that, I learned my adenomyosis was too severe for IVF to be possible at all.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I sat in an appointment while a doctor reviewed my sonogram and told me, plainly, that it wasn't going to happen. No follow-up. No next step. No one checking in. Just a broken spirit.

Eventually I made the decision to have a hysterectomy. It was the right call for my quality of life, and it was one of the hardest things I've ever chosen. I still hope we build our family someday, through surrogacy or adoption. That hope is still very much alive.

What got me through was not the medical care. It was other women. Support groups, mostly. People who had been through some version of it and could say the thing I needed to hear at the exact moment I needed to hear it.

It took years, and a long stretch of depression, before I could look at any of it clearly. When I finally could, what I saw was how much was missing. Not the medicine, the medicine was there. What was missing was everything around it. Someone to tell me what to expect. Someone to ask how I was holding up. Someone who had already walked this and could tell me what they wished they'd known.

That's what I'm building. I'm not a doctor. I'm a woman who lived this, and a product designer who has spent a career finding the places where systems fail the people using them. I never expected to find one of those places in my own care. But I did, and I couldn't walk away from it.