When It’s Not “Just Anxiety”: Women’s Symptoms That Get Overlooked

Have you ever been told your symptoms are “just anxiety” when you knew something deeper was going on? In this episode, we’re talking about the women’s health issues that are commonly misdiagnosed, dismissed, or overlooked — and why so many women are left fighting to be believed.

We explore how conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, heart disease, autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, ADHD, and perimenopause can show up in ways that are confusing, subtle, or easy to mislabel. From intense pelvic pain and sudden rectal pain to irregular periods, unexplained weight changes, acne, fertility struggles, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and pain that doesn’t fit neatly into one box, we unpack the symptoms women are often taught to minimize or stay silent about.

We also talk about why endometriosis symptoms can go undiagnosed for years, how PCOS can be missed when doctors rely on stereotypes instead of listening to cycle history, and why heart attack symptoms in women may look like reflux, nausea, anxiety, jaw pain, back pain, or unusual exhaustion instead of classic chest pain.

Then we widen the conversation to include autoimmune diseases like lupus, chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia, and the way women’s symptoms are often mislabeled as depression, stress, or “nothing is wrong.” We also take a deep look at ADHD in women and girls, why it’s often mistaken for laziness, disorganization, or being overwhelmed, and how perimenopause can intensify ADHD symptoms when hormones begin to shift.

Most importantly, we share practical self-advocacy tips for doctor’s appointments, including how to track symptoms, bring evidence, ask direct questions, push for a clear yes or no, and use the powerful phrase: “Please make a note in my chart.”

If you’ve ever felt dismissed by a doctor, confused by your symptoms, or unsure how to advocate for yourself, this episode is a reminder that you are not imagining it — and you deserve answers.

Press play, subscribe, share this episode with a woman who needs to hear it, and leave a review so more women can find these conversations.

Transcript

Welcome And A Recording Fail

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, this is Steel Versus Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I am very happy to be recording today. I'm a little irritated because, as you know, I do try to cluster my recordings so that I can have them spread out throughout the week. Unfortunately, for me, last week's episodes, um, I got one out. And then when I went back to um edit and, you know, push out the other episodes, apparently the audio never connected, which I'm gonna be honest with you was so frustrating that I just left it alone and I had to just walk away, which is why there was only one new episode last week. Something that I wanted to record on, so I'm gonna do it now, um, are common health issues that are often misdiagnosed for women. Now, one of the ones, one of these is personal. Well, actually, a couple of these are personal to me, but there's one in particular that I'm gonna focus in on because I'm actually gonna start going down a journey myself to get diagnosed. So there is quite a list here. This is not a comprehensive list at all. This was literally just a quick chat type into chat, like what are common women's health issues that are often misdiagnosed. Top of the list is endometriosis. You've actually, I've done many, many episodes discussing endometriosis. Not only did I work on that disease state in particular at one of my agencies, I have personal experience with this as I have endometriosis. Um and unfortunately, endometriosis, as it is a hereditary disease, I have been mindful of keeping an eye out for signs of it in my daughters. Now, my daughter's not menstruating, mex menstruating yet. However, they have told me about a particular symptom that usually nobody talks about. And I'm gonna actually talk, I want to talk about this because this was the first thing that happened to me. And I remember thinking I was gonna die. Um, I think I was about 11 or 11 or so years old, 11 or 12 years old. And I would very randomly get very intense pain. This is probably gonna sound TMI, but I'd get very intense pain in my anus, not in my butt, right in the whole butthole. This is so gross to talk about, but that's why nobody talks about it. So you get really in that's one of the symptoms is very, very intense pain in your butthole. It's very awkward to talk about. But I remember I would get this intense pain to the point where I'd be walking and it would kind of like throw me off my walk and I'd I'd kind of walk a little lopsided for a few minutes and just have to, I would literally just breathe through it and hope it would stop. And then it would, and I would just be like, oh my God, I don't know what that was. And I would just keep moving forward, you know, like women do. But in my research in the disease state, when I was working on this particular disease state for my job, I found that that was one of the odd symptoms. And I was shocked. It stunned me. So I wanted to put that out there to all of you. If you haven't experienced that, good, good, good. But if somebody has mentioned it to you in passing like it's a funny thing, you can actually point this out to them and say, hey, actually, there's a link to this. Do you have these other symptoms? Because it's such an obscure symptom. Nobody talks about it as a symptom because it's very random, as are many, many, many, many symptoms for a lot of the diseases that affect women. So, for example, on here, we also have PCOS. That's a big one. PCOS is often mistaken for waking, acne, irregular periods, infertility only, clues that could potentially point to it, irregular missed periods, acne, excess, facial body hair, fitting hair, weight changes, trouble getting pregnant. PCOS actually affects about one in 10 women of childbearing age. I think for PCOS in particular, when you walk into a room, the doctors are looking for hair because I distinctly remember at a certain point, I actually thought that I had PCOS. And I went to a um, my gosh, I forget endocrinologists. I can't remember the name of the the type of doctor I went to, but I did go to a doctor for it to see if there was a situation. And as soon as I walked in, and maybe this was this is one of those things that doctors do that is not great, but I explained what was going on and explained why I was concerned. And he was like, Yeah, you don't present, you don't present as PCOS though, so I think you should be fine. And I think we got I I vaguely remember getting blood work done potentially just to rule it out. And then that was the end of it. I don't think anything ever nothing ever really came from it, but his initial reaction was literally in just observing how I looked. So I think for PCOS, they are in particular looking for excess facial and body hair or thinning hair. But there are other things. You might not have that at all as a symptom, but you do have irregular missed periods and let's say weight fluctuation, those are symptoms of it. These are these diseases that I'm talking about here are so needle in a haystack that you have to actually be paying a lot of attention to your body and how your body is changing to things. Heart disease and heart attack is often mistaken for anxiety, reflex, panic attack, and muscle pain. Women may have chest pressure or discomfort, but also shortness of breath, nausea, back jaw, neck pain, unusual fatigue, sweating, or indigestion like symptoms. Women's symptoms women's symptoms may not look like classic crushing chest pain. This is actually a fair point. There have been many instances where I'm gonna be honest with you, I've gotten frightened that I'm like, oh my God, this is it. This has happened to me. But I'm it's not. I am in good health. But it's honestly good to know. It is good to know not to be hypochondriac, but it's good to have the knowledge of what the potential is because then you could recognize it not just in yourself, but in other people. Because again, we as women often write everything off until it's too late. And, you know, case in point, we will take everything over the counter just so we can keep moving forward. We don't slow down for anything. And to be perfectly frank, I'm kind of sick of it because we're dropping dead. Like it's happening. So we need to pay better attention to our health. Um, autoimmune diseases, autoimmune diseases, especially lupus, often gets mistaken for chronic fatigue, viral illness, depression, fibromyalgia. Clues that might point to it are joint and pain, swelling, rashes, mouth sores, hair loss, sun sensitivity, rain odds, kidney signs like swelling or urine changes, lupus can affect skin, joints, kidneys, lungs, heart, or nerves. Good grief. Fibromyalgia is often mistaken for depression, anxiety, nothing is wrong, arthritis. Is anyone else seeing a theme here that a lot of conditions that affect women are often mistaken, excuse me, quote unquote, written off as anxiety and depression. I I'm actually I'm looking at this chart and I'm seeing a theme here and it's really irritating. Let's see here. This is the one I wanted to hit on. ADHD in women and girls. ADHD in women and girls is often mistaken for anxiety, depression, laziness, overwhelmed mom syndrome. That little quote there, I don't know where this research engine pulled it from, but it made me really mad. But it hit home pretty hard. So I had um been doing research for my son and my daughters for ADHD because I had suspected for a couple of years now. And as you know, we were going through this whole process, which I actually am going to talk about in a different episode about diagnosis and how we got there. But I started seeing through lines, and I've talked to a couple of people at my office that have diagnosed ADHD, and in conversations with them, I started to pick up on some through lines of like, oh wait, like I do that. Is that a symptom? And you know, kind of like talking to other people and being honest about things and how things are going for you actually is helpful because you could in turn find something that's going on with you. So having these discussions and I got to a certain point where I started thinking about this habit that I have. It's not a habit. I guess it's the compulsion. That's the only other way I can think about it. The compulsion essentially is that I get really, really obsessed with something really, really quickly to the point where I'm immersing myself in whatever it where I'm immersed where I'm immersing myself in whatever it is. And then shortly thereafter, not shortly thereafter, you know, I'll be immersed, obsessed, just completely thrown into something for weeks, months, whatever it is. And then all of a sudden, almost like a light flipping off, the compulsion is for this pro particular topic is gone. And I haven't been able to really pinpoint it. And over the years, it's presented in different ways. It's not just compulsion for like action on doing things, it's food obsessions, it's actions obsessions doing things, people obsessions, being a friend with somebody, dating somebody, to the point where I cannot focus on more than one item, one important item at a time, or one important person at a time. And it happened enough where I remember, you know, my family saying, like, almost like um putting me down for it and putting blame on me in certain situations for not being able to maintain, you know, for example, my relationship with my husband as well as like other relationships with friends. At the time when I when I he and I started dating, that was the that was the obsession. So I did lost a lot of people in my life at that point because they just they couldn't understand that. And to be honest, I didn't even really truly understand it at that moment either as to why I couldn't balance myself. Because for my whole life, there has been this massive imbalance in discussion with so I ended up looking that up and I said I had this this particular compulsion. What could this potentially mean? It literally came up like, no, this is actually a common sign of ADHD. And I'm like, oh my God, you know, not only do I have this compulsion, my brothers actually have this compulsion too. I'm like, I would bet money that we all have ADHD and just never got diagnosed with it. Now, the big defining factor between myself and my brothers, there's obviously varying levels of it. One of the women that I work with that also has ADHD had told me I was discussing this with her and I and I explained like my situation. And she said, you know, you've basically found coping mechanisms. The reason why you've been so successful with your life is because you found a way to cope. You figured out a pathway, you figured out things that you needed to do to make sure you could get from point A to point B successfully. The reason why now it's coming up again as a problem for me is because of the hormone imbalance that I'm now experiencing with perimenopause. This is actually quite common for women to be able to cope cope with ADHD their entire lives, be completely successful, be totally fine, and then boom, a bomb goes off. And that bomb is your hormone saying goodbye, estrogen and hello, ADHD. You can no longer focus. You can only focus for certain portions of your day. You have intense brain fog. There's days where I actually have time issue articulating my words, which, as you can imagine, for me is an issue. So, in going through the process with my children and getting them to neurologists and making sure that they get diagnosed, I also decide I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna do this too. I'm gonna go down this path. Like maybe I'm full of crap. Maybe I don't have ADHD and I just have perimenopause and I'm just like poking at straws. But you know what? If you have health insurance, let's use it, people. Get in there and get your diagnoses. Now, the most important thing for you to understand is that when you're going to the doctor for a particular reason, you actually need to make sure that you're advocating for yourself. You have to go with your evidence in hand. I need this. I need you to tell me yes or no. The times that I have been getting the most pushback, I continue to push harder and I ask them to make a note in my chart. Please make a note in my chart that I mentioned this just in case anything comes up in the future. That usually will trigger something because if they make a note in your chart that you complained about something and they never investigated it, then it actually makes them liable. And that is going to motivate them. That sounds like a real back-ended, back, back-handed way to get somebody to do something for you. But you know what? That is the secret. That's the secret sauce, basically, to getting your healthcare providers to help you out with something. Can you please note it in my chart? So, in any case, ADHD for women, I'm actually planning to tackle this head on. I'm going to find somebody in our area to get so that I can go in for testing and get diagnosed. Um, and then I'm gonna go from there. And I'm gonna be honest with you, there's a little small part of me that's excited about this because if I actually get diagnosed, right? And they allow for me to get medication, that means the current Jenny that I currently am, that is already super because I am super, could actually be super super if I get diagnosed and get medicine that can actually help me be as productive and as, you know, focused as I should be. It's really honestly, I'm excited about it. You know, most people might not be like, oh my God, I have this. What am I gonna do? You have to look at it more from a perspective of, well, now I know and now I know what to do, and I know how to fix the situation andor deal with the situation. And that's what we're going here for here, ladies. We want to make sure that um we're facing things head on, we're not burying them, and that um we're taking care of ourselves. Now, there's a few other health-related things I'm gonna touch on too, including my venture with my varicose veins. That's coming shortly, as well as unfortunately, I am gonna have to get blood work because I suspect potentially diabetes, but we'll see. But in any case, this is the year that we're all getting healthy and that we're keep staying on top of ourselves and that we're making sure that we're paying attention to what's happening to our bodies and to our mental health. So I'm very excited to be here with you today. I really hope you found this episode informative. Please, please, please don't stop asking questions. Make sure you're advocating for yourself. Until the next one, take care, everybody. Thank you.