Leo Lorena Wyss

Anna Blume is in pain. Chronic pain. Sometimes so bad that she faints. The doctor, who looks like she's straight out of a children's ad for Pinguí, advises her to apply some heat, go for a jog, do some yoga. Maybe try some monk's pepper? Anna doesn't know what to say. The receptionist in pink fleece and white Crocs holds the door open for her. Who's next?

In search of doctors who take her pain seriously, we follow Anna Blume on her odyssey through doctors' offices and waiting rooms characterised by bureaucratic absurdities, prejudices, attributions and neoliberal self-optimisation imperatives. While Anna is prescribed antidepressants by a psychiatrist in a Hawaiian shirt, just to be on the safe side, Pamela Reif and Princess Victoria demonstrate in the waiting room how a healthy body can vibrate in harmony with patriarchal expectations. Meanwhile, the weary chorus of women waiting on orange plastic chairs solves the next crossword puzzle. Exclamation of pain, horizontal, three letters? Anna becomes increasingly desperate. The longer the search for a treatment option and an explanation for the pain takes, the more she questions her own perception. Her relationship with Robyn also suffers increasingly from the consequences of the situation. For lack of alternatives, Anna nevertheless continues, going from doctor to doctor, telling her story over and over again. Until she threatens to break down under the increasing psychological strain.

With sharply dissecting humour, Leo Lorena Wyss's Apropos Schmerz (Denken Sie an etwas Schönes) illuminates the abysses that open up in the context of chronic illness in a patriarchal, binary gender health system, questioning the lack of interconnection between medicine, gender and queerness. Why is pain experienced by female-identified people still so often explained as psychosomatic? How do heterosexual and cis-male norms manifest themselves in research and treatment? And how does this disregard affect the everyday lives and mental health of those affected – in this case, specifically by endometriosis? Apropos Schmerz (Denken Sie an etwas Schönes) seeks answers to these questions and a language for pain that is so difficult to put into words.