My First & Hopefully Last Menstrual Cycle

So apparently AI isn’t right all the time. I was trying to check in to my doctor’s appointment Thursday through this online app system that uses so-called intelligence to capture my family health history, but I kept getting stuck on a page asking for my last menstrual cycle.  At first I hit the back button and re-checked my gender, but after five attempts I gave up and just answered best I could. I had to approximate my LMP and then check the box if my menses has been normal, which I’m pretty sure it has not been. I started thinking menses had to be misspelled, like maybe they meant to ask if “men see,” which I do, obviously.   I even asked my wife for her help but she thought that I was just being an idiot. The form actually started making some sense when it asked for the frequency of my annual cycles— I said 2, which is about the number of times I ride a bike. I finally showed up at the appointment and in between blood pressure and the flu shot my doctor asked me about my last period.  “Come again?” I nearly fell off the exam table. “We saw your gynecological history Bry – what’s going on there?,” he said, smirking, acknowledging he had seen my peculiar pre-visit chart entry…we later had a good laugh, at my expense I’m sure, but this whole pre-game check-in exercise for medical appointments has me thinking — like what else is misinterpreted in our medical records, how do our charts define us and what else has AI assumed…or are our medical records trying to tell us something?  I suppose there are two good things to come from all this - (1) if you’re to believe my chart, apparently I can hold off on the menopause bars I started devouring last year and (2) we still have amazing doctors and nurses looking over records and actually performing the art of medicine, instead of AI. And part of me realizes that our medical record doesn’t really define us, that it’s what we do about what’s in there that matters. Even if it’s saying I’m due for a period.