“In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
~Viktor E. Frankl
Me v PMDD, an app to track symptoms and treatments of Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder to empower women to take their health into their own hands, began with suffering – suffering from PMDD. I, Brett Buchert, co-founder & CEO of Me v PMDD, Inc., had experienced the painful depression, breathless anxiety, unsolicited irritability, and suffocating hopelessness of PMDD for over a decade, before finally receiving the correct diagnosis to plant seeds of healing in my life. In 2016, at the urging of my doctor and the immense help of my mom, Sheila Buchert, I began tracking my symptoms daily and found that they only arose in the premenstrual phase of my cycle and subsided during my period. To my doctor, the data was undeniable: it was PMDD.
Tracking my symptoms saved my life.
Since then, I continued to track my symptoms every day using paper calendars and excel spreadsheets to evaluate the new treatments I began and to validate that when the symptoms overwhelmed me it wasn’t me, it was PMDD.
At a doctor’s visit in May of 2017, I remarked off-hand to my mom and doctor that this tracking on paper was getting a little much, there should really be an app for that.
A single light bulb went off above my mom and I’s heads. An app? An app! An app to track PMDD… Together, we can do it!
And so, within days, Me v PMDD, Inc. was born.
We found our little way to make meaning out of my years of suffering from PMDD in the past and the years to come, by building a tool for women, including myself, to fight back against PMDD, and in the process empowering sufferers of this heartbreaking condition, to choose instead to see themselves as warriors, because that is truly what we are.
~Brett Buchert
Co-founder & CEO
Me v PMDD, Inc.
