To viewers grieving the death of Stranger Things—by death I mean not the finale of the Netflix series this past January, but the show’s unfortunate decline, after the third season, into a plodding, convoluted ghost of its former self—let me offer something of an analgesic. Travel with me, if you will, back to the superb first season, where Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers, a broke, chain smoking, seemingly delusional mother, opens a can of paint and scrawls the alphabet onto a wall of her home. Joyce hopes her missing son will use the letters to communicate with her from the Beyond. Ryder’s performance would count as one of the most convincing portrayals of insanity in recent screen history, if it weren’t for one thing: Joyce is not mentally ill. Her son is trapped in the Upside Down, and her love is so powerful, she’s able to ignore the rules of logic and perceive what no one else can.

I became a fan of Stranger Things around the time I became, in my own way, Joyce Byers. To certain people in my life, I had recently morphed into a neurotic, monomaniacal woman. Not because I thought my child had been kidnapped by supernatural beings, but because I was convinced I was sick even though no tests could prove it. At 34, during my first year of a doctoral program in literature, I began to experience an electric-shock like pain in my pelvis. Sitting exacerbated the pain, so I bought a standing desk. Exercise beyond walking hurt, so I gave up biking, yoga, and rock climbing. Through regular physical therapy and rest, I managed the pain for several years. Then, in early 2020, my symptoms mysteriously worsened.

By the end of 2020, simply getting out of bed was excruciating. I left my graduate program with my dissertation halfway done. From bed, I booked appointments with a new round of doctors: radiologists, pain specialists, pelvic specialists. Everywhere I turned, practitioners doubted me when I said walking and standing were excruciating. A psychologist whom I was required to see as part of my treatment at a pain clinic asked if my parents had treated me well, hinting the source of my symptoms resided in childhood trauma. In her assessment, she concluded, “Ms. Cutchin has some symptoms and behaviors known to be unhelpful for pain including: some fear, avoidant behavior, pain anxiety.” 

When a physical therapist saw me limping, she said, “Ask yourself, ‘Why do I feel I have to walk like this?’”

Worst of all, someone close to me hinted I was unconsciously refusing to walk because I “liked the bed and the bath.”

Holed up in bed—a bed that had become for some a symbol of my mental instability—I began watching science fiction. I’ve long been a fan of murder shows and spy thrillers, series in which the culprits are certifiably human and logic more or less carries the day. I binged The Americans, The Bureau, and Bosch, along with some less illustrious procedurals. Then, for want of new programming—it appeared my pain could outlast even Peak TV’s flood of content—I began to watch sci-fi

Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength. A recurrent trope of sci-fi is the woman who is not believed. There’s Joyce Byers and her can of paint. Iconically, there’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, locked away in a mental institution because she claims—accurately—that cyborgs from the future want to kill her son. In Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) tells a senate committee she traveled through wormholes to meet an alien disguised as her father. The (male) chairman points out that video evidence contradicts her account and accuses her of suffering from a “self-reinforcing delusion.”

Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength.

Also delusional, or so a male colleague insists, is DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) in the excellent near-future dystopian series The Capture. When DCI Carey confronts a superior, Commander Danny Hart (Ben Miles), with her suspicion the UK government is altering CCTV footage in real time using deep-fake AI technology, he wastes no time gaslighting her. “You’ve had a shock tonight, Rachel. Why don’t you get some rest.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a male character tell a woman she needs some rest, I’d be able to upgrade every streaming subscription to premium. In the German limited series The Signal, it’s a case of “space sickness” that plagues astronaut Paula (Peri Baumeister), or so a dismissive colleague would have her believe. Aboard a space shuttle, Paula hears a signal she knows can only come from aliens. She records the signal, but when she plays the recording for the rest of her team, there’s nothing on the tape. Her (once again, male) colleague, Hadi (Hadi Khanjanpour), who initially heard the signal, too, tells Paula she’s unwell. “Go lie down.”

Riddled with pain, facing disbelief from those around me, the stories of Joyce, Paula, DCI Carey, Ellie Arroway, and Sarah Connor brought me solace, and a shred of hope. I belonged to a genre of female characters who had to fight to be believed. In the worlds these narratives portray, women’s claims are outlandish, otherworldly, weird, and also true. Eventually, each character finds someone who believes her. Sometimes it’s a man, like Jim Hopper (David Harbour) in Stranger Things, who learns to trust Joyce. Sometimes it’s a woman or girl: Paula’s most steadfast advocate in The Signal is her disabled nine-year-old daughter, Charlie (Yuna Bennett), who, working with her father, figures out the time and place of the aliens’ arrival and proves her mother right.

Watching these films and shows between visits to doctors bent on dismissing me, I grasped sci-fi’s genius: It taps into our culture’s deepest anxieties about the trustworthiness of women. In our real-world political climate, when a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof? And yet, our standards of proof are devised by the same systems—legal, educational, medical—built by men to protect male interests. In the medical system, imaging and other tests count as “proof” of illness or pain, but such tests screen only for well-researched diseases, and what we know about those diseases largely comes from research on male subjects. No definitive tests exist for a host of conditions that predominately affect those assigned female at birth, like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. A woman with this kind of disease might as well be telling her doctors: Cyborgs are coming. Aliens have made contact.

By exploring whose testimony counts as reliable, and on what terms, sci-fi provides a template for what ethical philosophers call epistemic justice. “Epistemic” refers to knowledge. In our everyday lives, we convey knowledge to others by sharing our expertise, by relating our experience, and so forth. When a speaker offering knowledge is dismissed because of who they are—a woman, a trans person, a Black or Brown person—they are wronged in their “capacity as a giver of knowledge,” as philosopher Miranda Fricker puts it in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. The one who speaks loses out, but so does a community of hearers who would benefit from the information the speaker seeks to convey. Sci-fi dramatizes epistemic injustice and proposes a different way: We must practice epistemic humility by taking stock of our prejudices and admitting that someone who looks and sounds different than us might be right. 

In the eyes of Western medicine, there is little stranger than a malfunctioning female or gender nonconforming body. According to The New York Times, “Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of situations.” A stunning 72% of millennial women report feeling gaslit by medical professionals, a Mira survey found. If you’re nonwhite, it gets worse. Black women are less likely to develop breast cancer than white women—but 40% more likely to die from the disease due to delays in diagnosis and care. Delays in diagnosis stem partly from lack of research into women’s health. Until recently, women were considered inferior subjects to men in basically all research. “There are parts of your body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of mars,” Rachel E. Gross writes in Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. On top of it all, there’s medicine’s age-old tendency to see women’s maladies as psychogenic in nature—think of the prevalence of the hysteria diagnosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Today, women are less likely to be told our pain or fatigue is “in our heads.” Instead, in a sophistry-laden twist, we are told our symptoms stem from a “brain” gone haywire. According to the brain-based model of chronic pain, when symptoms persist more than three to six months with no obvious organic cause, the brain is at fault, or more precisely, a “maladaptive plastic reorganization in central pain processing circuits.” A spate of recent self-help books and pain reeducation programs promise to teach your brain to unlearn pain via cognitive-behavioral interventions. The problem with these treatments is they fail to account for the instances when pain persists because doctors and tests miss its underlying cause. Around 70% of chronic pain patients are female. Women are more likely to suffer from underreached conditions like fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, pelvic pain, Long Covid, Lyme disease, and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Telling a woman her pain stems from a “maladaptive” brain is today’s version of “it’s just hysteria.” 

Given sci-fi’s uncanny ability to channel and critique these medical biases, I’ve put together a quiz: Can you tell the difference between a real-life sick woman and science fiction? The following statements were uttered either in a science fiction film or TV show, or in a real-life medical setting where a female patient came in complaining of physical symptoms. Circle the correct answer:

Answer key: B, D, F, H and J are from science fiction—The OA, Manifest, Stranger Things, Terminator 2, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, respectively. A, C and I are from medical records shared with me by a female patient with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome; E was uttered by the doctor of an Instagram user living with ME/CFS and POTS. G is from my own life. A noted Bay Area pelvic pain practitioner insisted I download a pain therapy app that could, he said, “re-wire” my brain so I no longer felt pain. “The app will teach you that you can’t use the word ‘pain’ any longer if you want to heal,” he told me.

I’m not saying mind-body tools aren’t helpful in managing symptoms. In the early years of my pain, I did quite a lot of psychotherapy and embodied meditation. These tools helped, especially when it came to managing the stress of illness. By the time I became bedridden, I knew I’d gone as far as I could with mind-body modalities. I told anyone who would listen I believed my symptoms had a biomechanical source, but, as time went on, I doubted that source would ever be found. After all, I’d had an MRI, the gold standard for diagnosis of pelvic disorders, and it had revealed nothing. 

Still, I kept searching. For years, I’d been hearing about a world-famous pelvic pain specialist in Arizona. Seeing him would mean traveling seven hundred miles and paying for the visit out of pocket. By early 2022, I was out of other options. A friend and I rented a van and drove seven hundred miles from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Arizona desert listening to crime podcasts. Actually, my friend drove; I laid on a mattress in the back.

The Arizona doctor took by far the most careful, thorough patient history of any provider I’d seen. He recommended a round of pelvic floor botox, and, when that didn’t work, he offered a diagnosis. 

When a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof?

“All the signs point to pudendal nerve entrapment.” 

The pudendal nerve runs through the lower pelvis and innervates urinary, bowel, and sexual function. I’d long known my nerve was irritated. But none of the pelvic specialists I’d seen had raised the possibility it might be compressed. Compression, the Arizona doctor explained, doesn’t show up on an MRI; the nerve is too small, too hidden. Compression typically arises from a traumatic injury, or repetitive stress. The year before the onset of my symptoms, I’d biked one thousand miles down the California coast. The pressure of the bike seat against my pelvis caused scar tissue to build up around the nerve. To protect the nerve, paradoxically. 

It took 11 years from the onset of symptoms to receive the diagnosis. The treatment: a fairly straightforward decompression surgery.

Pudendal nerve entrapment is an underresearched condition that affects—you guessed it—women more often than men at a rate of seven to three. Childbirth is a common trigger. Diagnostic criteria do exist, but none of the chronic pain or pelvic disorder specialists I’d previously seen were familiar with those criteria. Pudendal entrapment isn’t common, but it’s not as rare as one might think, either. Studies indicate it affects up to one percent of the general population. Because pudendal entrapment lacks an ICD-code—such codes are used globally to classify medical diagnosess—insurance companies view decompression surgery as experimental and refuse to reimburse it. (In contrast, ICD-codes exist for “Sucked into jet engine V97.33X” and “Struck by turkey W61.42XA.”)

Broken bodies tell broken stories

Reading Lists

Four months after surgery, I began to see improvement. Within 15 months, I was leading a normal life again: walking, sitting, and traveling—without a van and mattress. I made plans to return to the PhD program. 

Today, I’m grateful to the Arizona doctor who took the time to listen and believe my story. I’m also, frankly, enraged when I think about the time, energy, and pain I would have been spared if the medical system had the patience and trust to take my symptoms seriously. If it had, I wouldn’t have become Joyce Beyers and spent years getting others to see the writing on the wall.

Read: 8 min

Michelle Hewitt has spent years raising concerns about medical assistance in dying (MAID).

So she never expected to become a widow because of it.

Hewitt has lived with multiple sclerosis for nearly two decades. As board chair of the advocacy organization Disability Without Poverty, she hears regularly from people with disabilities who consider MAID because of poverty, insufficient medical care or social support. 

But when Hewitt’s husband, Victor Enns, wanted to die by MAID, she set her objections aside and chose to support him. 

“That’s one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made,” she said in February.

Hewitt, who lost her husband to MAID in December, says that supporting Enns was the right choice. 

“I still believe it’s the right decision.” 

But the process by which he was approved for MAID has reinforced — and increased — her concerns.

“It was easier for Victor to get MAID than it was for him to get anything else,” she said. “I just don’t believe that that’s how it should be.”  

Whirlwind romance

Enns and Hewitt always knew death would enter their marriage sooner rather than later. 

When they met in January 2021, she was 53, he was 65. She was recently widowed for the second time and he divorced for the third. Neither wanted to waste time. 

And they didn’t. Enns’ four-word introduction on a disability-focused social networking site — “I like your hair” — quickly led to lengthy emails then video calls. 

He was in Gimli, Man., she was in Kelowna, B.C. They shared meals over video calls timed around medication schedules.

In April 2021, Enns flew to Kelowna. The plan was to spend two weeks together. Instead, he returned to Manitoba only once, to refill prescriptions. They wed in August of that year. 

Enns wrote the officiant’s introduction to their vows.

“You have learned from your own experiences and from each other, suffering is unavoidable, real and to be believed,” Enns wrote. “And [you] know to offer each other succor and consolation when tears fall and times are hard.”

Neither knew how difficult that would be.

Medical crises

Moving to B.C. was risky for Enns. It meant leaving his longtime doctors behind.

Enns had struggled with chronic pain and depression for decades. Throughout his life, he had often felt disbelieved by the medical establishment. His amputated left leg was the clearest example. He had had to convince doctors that an amputation was the only way to end the searing pain in his leg, the result of a failed foot fusion surgery and severe osteoarthritis. 

After that surgery, pain continued, just elsewhere in his body. 

In B.C., Enns found a family doctor quickly: a woman who, coincidentally, had attended school with one of Enns’ sons. But in 2022 she moved, and he needed to find a new family doctor to prescribe painkillers. 

Enns was caught in the crossfire of two health crises: a provincial opioid epidemic and a national doctor shortage. The only B.C. doctor who would prescribe painkillers was an addiction specialist.  For the rest of his life, Enns felt he was labelled as an addict. 

He received a prescription for methadone, a new drug for him. It was too much. He almost died and was put in a medically induced coma so doctors could stabilize him.

Once released, his memory and motivation to leave his home diminished. He began sleepwalking. He once poured boiling water on himself while asleep; another time, he fell after attempting to walk without a prosthetic. 

Emergency room doctors told Enns and Hewitt nothing was wrong. Hewitt says they were told Enns was at-risk of being flagged as a patient who fabricated stories. 

Enns wanted to receive an opioid his former family doctor had prescribed. It gave him fair control of his pain, he said. But doctors refused, noting they were concerned it could kill him. 

Funeral march begins

In August 2024, Enns woke Hewitt from her daily afternoon nap to say the pain in his left shoulder was unbearable. 

He wanted MAID.

Hewitt was not completely surprised. She could hear his shoulder bones grind against each other all the time. “It was the percussion section in his shoulder,” she said. 

But this was not the music of a lively rock band. The pain was keeping time to a funeral march. 

Hewitt knew her husband would not waver in his decision to get MAID. So she put her advocacy work aside and set about supporting him.

For Enns, MAID was the right choice, she says. But not because it reinforced his dignity.

“It was empowering in that it was the only thing that Victor could take control of,” she said in February. “It was the only thing left.” 

Pain increases

When Enns announced he wanted MAID, he was on the waitlist for shoulder surgery. Hewitt called his surgeon immediately to explain the urgency of the situation. A spot had recently opened, and Enns had surgery five days later. 

The recovery went well. But it magnified Enns’ other pain.

“It was like he actually started feeling the rest of all the pain that he was carrying that this [shoulder] pain was muting a little bit,” said Davina Kula, a personal care worker who worked with Enns and Hewitt since 2022. 

Enns slept in a medical recliner because searing back pain made lying down impossible. The percussive pain was now in his knee. 

Kula understood why Enns felt dismissed by the medical system. At appointments with Enns and Hewitt, doctors often first directed questions to Kula. “It feels like his [medical] issues got minimized quite a bit,” Kula said. 

Enns was diagnosed with dementia in April 2025. 

After this, his desire to obtain MAID swung into high gear. 

“I felt like we were talking about MAID every day,” said Kula. Spilled food, dropped items, missed words all prompted Enns to discuss MAID. 

Hewitt was conflicted. The man she had vowed to love in sickness and in health, till death did them part, was pursuing a method of death she opposed. 

Yet, she wanted his suffering to end.

This was no regular dying process. When her previous husbands had been diagnosed with cancer, they had always remained hopeful for a cure. 

There was no such hope with MAID. “Death was there constantly,” she said.

‘Blurry’ lines

In July, Enns had the first of two medical assessments needed to determine if he was legally eligible for MAID. 

He worried about forgetting details or not being believed. Hewitt helped prepare notes for him. 

They were ultimately not necessary. 

At the first assessment, the assessor told Enns he was approved shortly after Enns began telling his story. The second assessor began the assessment by telling Enns he was approved.

“They were so fast. They weren’t worth talking about,” Enns said in December, five days before he died. 

Both assessments worried Hewitt.

Under Canadian law, MAID patients are approved as either Track 1 or Track 2. Track 1 means their death is reasonably foreseeable; Track 2 means their death is not. 

Hewitt had assumed Enns would qualify as Track 2 MAID. But assessors told him he could be Track 1, because of his dementia diagnosis.

Hewitt had previously lost two husbands to cancer. She felt she knew what dying looks like, and that Enns was not dying, even though he was diagnosed with dementia. 

“I thought that I could clearly identify a Track 1 MAID person,” she said in February. “Clearly I can’t.” 

Dementia has proven controversial in MAID requests. 

A report released last fall by the Ontario MAID Death Review Committee described several cases where dementia patients were approved for Track 1 MAID. In many cases, individuals were recently diagnosed and were struggling with fear of the future. Committee members, many of whom were doctors or nurses, disagreed with each other about whether MAID assessments for dementia patients require more rigour. 

Under federal law, each MAID death must be reported to Health Canada, and reports must indicate if patients were Track 1 or Track 2.

But Enns and Hewitt did not know what track Enns was approved under. Hewitt says the assessors never told them.

A patient’s track affects how they are treated. Track 2 patients are supposed to be informed of counselling, disability and community supports that could relieve their suffering. 

Enns did not receive any such offers, Hewitt says. In fact, there was such little communication after the MAID approval that Enns began to worry doctors had forgotten about his scheduled death. 

For Hewitt, the experience increased her concerns about MAID. She had had concerns about Track 2 since it was legalized in 2021. Now, she had concerns about Track 1 as well.

“If the lines between Track 1 and Track 2 are so blurry, I now have strong doubts about Track 1,” she said.

‘That’s enough’

But Enns was at peace with his decision.

“I’m going to, to die,” he said in December, five days before his death. 

“I’m 70 years old. I’m not a babe in the woods or anything like that. I’ve had different kinds of pain and mental health issues for 50 years.” He looked down, his voice cracking. “I think that’s enough. That’s really what it is.”  

The dementia was also robbing his comprehension, the ultimate fear for a professional poet like Enns. He struggled to understand poems he had just written for a book to be published posthumously.  

“I don’t want to wait until I sound like a fool to myself,” he said, before acknowledging that might sound derogatory.

“Language like that isn’t appropriate for someone with a disability, but that’s how it feels sometimes to me.” 

He wanted a good death, he said, and felt MAID was good “compared to some of the other options.”

He knew his physical pain would never truly subside. The dementia was here to stay.

“There’s some things you just can’t fix, no matter how hard you try,” he said.

Hewitt remained troubled by the process. 

“I have chosen to support Victor in what he wants, but this journey in itself—” She paused, then turned and spoke to Enns. “It’s not been a good journey for you.”

“Not as good as it could be,” he agreed.  

“But really?” He turned to his wife with a laugh. “You expect MAID to be a good journey?” 

Final goodbyes

In the end, it was not the good death Enns had wanted.

Enns and Hewitt set about making his last day as memorable as possible. He ate a hearty pancake breakfast with Hewitt and all the caregivers. He had strawberries and maple syrup and a thick milkshake. He was the “life and soul of the party,” Hewitt said.

After a rest, Enns picked his final outfit: dress pants and a dress shirt.

They wheeled in their wheelchairs to the hospice, which could be seen from their condo. They took their time, pausing to watch fish in the pond outside before entering the hospice. In their final photo together, they smiled like newlyweds. 

He had asked to not lie down on the bed for very long before the procedure began because of his back pain. That was not to be. 

The IV was set about 45 minutes before MAID was to begin. His dress shirt was taken off. Later, they had to reset the IV because it had not been inserted properly. Enns cried in pain as he waited for the medication to take effect.

Hewitt had to leave his side so the IV could be reset. They yelled their final goodbyes to each other from across the room.

Hewitt watched it all, telling him she loved him. Enns said he loved her and his family. Then, it was done. 

Hewitt returned to an empty condo, walked her service dog and took a sleeping pill.

She had gone from being a vocal critic of MAID to a MAID widow.

‘Love remains’

Even living under MAID’s long shadow, Enns and Hewitt found joy together. 

In the evening, after their care team had left, they ate ice cream, laughing like children gobbling forbidden desserts. 

She would describe what happened on her nightly walks with her service dog, and they would end each night by saying the same words together: “We are better together, because we are happy, we are safe and we are very well loved.”

Five days before his death, the affection was obvious. They kissed. They laughed. They hung onto each other’s words; they knew not many words were left.

“I’ve learned he is incredibly strong, to just daily go through the level of pain that he goes [through],” Hewitt said. 

“And then to make this decision, and to be fair, going into it knowing that it’s not something that I would have advocated for him to do.”

Enns knew nothing had changed his wife’s love for him.

“I’ve got what I have in your arms right now, and that is that the love remains,” he told her. “That we are still, still —”

She completed  his sentence. “Very much in love.” 

The post ‘The only thing left’: One woman’s journey from MAID critic to MAID widow appeared first on Canadian Affairs.