When reading this week for our discussion, I was very interested in the “Cancer Game Board” from the graphic novel chosen by Jules. I thought that it served as a painfully accurate representation of health anxiety for women and how women are underrepresented/underserved in society in terms of health, wellness, science. There is no end or winning to the game, or any sense to be made of playing it, it is just a cycle of worrying, finding reassurance (in research, from the doctor, outside sources etc.), and then heightened worrying with the discovery of yet another risk factor that could have been preventable, or maybe not preventable at all, or something the narrator had not known of previously. It spoke a lot to me about how women’s health is treated in society; health trials/studies for women are not performed as often as they are for men, products and medications for women (period products, hormones, birth control etc.) have harmful impacts on health and especially reproductive organs, many different risk factors can be attributed to one disease, and so on- it feels as though there is no escaping or avoiding these risk factors as a woman, which is captured by the board game’s circular nature and lack of an ending.
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