What’s Wrong? Personal Histories of Chronic Pain and Bad Medicine

Chronic pain, especially women’s pain, is often overlooked or undertreated by the medical community, as explicated by Williams (Commute) through five devastating accounts. Dee had congenital abnormalities, childhood sexual abuse plus abusive parenting, continual torment from fibromyalgia, and finally bladder cancer. Growing up queer, Rain was born with a genetic abnormality that reduced their ability to fight infection, eventually identifying as a disabled, nonbinary trans woman amid chronic pain. Child gymnast Alex was sexually abused by doctor Larry Nassar under the guise of “treatment,” developing endometriosis and other agonizing disorders afterwards. Adriana fell into alcohol and substance addictions after extensive physical and emotional abuse as a child and subsequent depression. Herself belittled, bullied, and sexually assaulted in childhood, Williams hurt like “my body was trying to kill me,” despite her dogged but unsuccessful journey through medical treatments. Her limpid, disturbing artwork proffers striking visual metaphors: a doctor’s head topping a Pez dispenser of drugs, a ghost hooked up to an IV, statistics embodied by columns of bloodstained women, a woman without a torso embracing her own skeleton.