"Shin splints,” the physician told me. “It’s probably just shin splints,” he said, dismissing my atrophied leg with the catch-all diagnosis. He then prescribed a couple of Advil as he signed a doctor’s note to excuse me from track practice. Staring back at my dad and I, he said the X-ray didn’t show anything unusual and that I should be fine within a week.

I hung my head. By now we had spent a small fortune on what seemed like nothing more than my own wimpy whining. Almost all runners get shin splints — I was just the one who couldn’t handle them.

Despite the doctor’s diagnosis, something still seemed amiss. Shin splints do not cause one’s leg to shrink two sizes. They tend to affect both legs, not just one. They are usually from overuse of muscles, causing them to get swollen and irritated, a weak core, “flat feet,” or minor stress fractures on little bones, according Web MD. Most importantly, however, they simply do not hurt like my leg did.

I still remember the nights when I would be doing homework and all of the sudden my shin felt like it was slowly being broken in half. Writhing on the floor, I would grasp for my leg praying that maybe I could keep it from snapping. One night, it was so excruciating that all I could do was clutch to my mom, quiet tears dampening her shirt.

Once I leveled back out to the pain I had grown used to, I felt silly and like maybe I just wasn’t being tough enough. This feeling would follow me all the way to my doctor’s appointments where I would stumble through my sentences, trying to explain how my shin felt during those upsetting episodes.

The various sports doctors I saw offered different explanations, but ultimately fell back on the belief that it was really nothing some time on the bench and light painkillers couldn’t fix.

Finally, toward the end of the season, my physician found what had been causing so much trouble in my leg. Lacing up and down my tibia was a web of fractures. They were thin enough to be hard to see in X-rays, extensive enough to look almost normal. I guess when one’s entire bone is covered in little lines, it seems like they’re supposed to be there.

Immediately, they put me in a support boot, which I had to wear for at least four months. If it wasn’t healed by then, they said they would have to find another way to mend the bone. The bone had been slowly getting worse as I hobbled along with a diagnosis of basic “shin splints” for the weeks prior.

Let me assure you, I am not the wimp I thought I was. I am the kid who laughed her way through a staph infection, the right side of my face swelling larger and larger each day. I am the kid who pierced her ears with nothing more than a cube of ice and a needle. When I was in track freshman year, I got my foot caught on a hurdle, did a full 360 and then tore up my whole right hip, leaving a six-inch long scar.

So, with that said, I am concerned the doctor’s dismissive diagnosis of “shin splints” might have been based on the fact that, as The Atlantic’s Joe Fassler quotes in his article, “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” “women cry — what can you do?”

While women might cry when Allie and Noah spend their last night together in “The Notebook” or when our brand new iPhone shatters (I know I did), we don’t cry over broken nails and spilled milk and stupid cuts and scrapes. We are tougher than that.

If one wants a really good example of this, I recommend reading Fassler’s aforementioned article about his wife, Rachel, and her experience in the emergency room. He starts by saying, “Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge.” However, when he watched her “collapse on [their] bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, [he] called the ambulance then helped [her] to the bathroom to vomit.”

Once at the hospital, they got her on a gurney and waited. Fassler says, “Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight.” When he finally found a nurse, she assured him Rachel would just “have to wait her turn,” then said “You’re just feeing a little pain, honey,” to Rachel’s poor face as it twisted with pain.

Several agonizing hours later, she was dismissed as just another patient with kidney stones and cast into the hospital’s peripherals. Little did they know her real ailment was something called ovarian torsion. Fassler explains that she had an ovarian cyst which “grew, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge.” He goes on to say, “it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.”

Finally, “14 and a half hours from when her pain had started,” Rachel was properly diagnosed and prepped for an emergency surgery. However, to me, that seems about 13 hours too late.

Fassler references the essay, “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” in his article, which explains something called the “Yentl Syndrome,” or where “women are more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health care system until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.”

In addition, he writes, “nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain [while] women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing.” Overall, when a woman speaks up about not feeling well, the professional world doesn’t quite seem to believe her.

The unfortunate thing is, I see this all the time. When one of my childhood friends began feeling excruciating pain in her lower abdomen accompanied with frequent seizures, the doctors thought it was an attention-seeking, psychologically-induced problem, which makes sense, because everyone wants to have seizures, drop out of school and be bedridden. And don’t even get me started on the years my mom spent trying to get a doctor to acknowledge her now-diagnosed Crohn’s Disease.

This dismissal of female pain as lesser or lighter than males’ is silently growing into a huge problem. Women everywhere are biting their lips and clenching their fists to get through pain they shouldn’t be ashamed to mention. We should not be perpetuating the idea that women are wimpier, because it is an idea so ludicrous, it never should have existed at all.