Fidji Simo, an executive at OpenAI, is taking a temporary medical leave to treat postural tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. The company announced the decision in an internal memo to staff on Friday, noting she’d return in several weeks after pursuing treatment.
This wouldn’t be particularly newsworthy except for one detail: Simo was initially misdiagnosed by doctors who attributed her symptoms to being a “tired mom.”
That’s a damning indictment of how medicine still works in 2026. Not because individual doctors are malicious, but because systemic bias has a way of making real illnesses invisible, especially for women.
The Long Road to a Real Diagnosis
Simo was diagnosed with POTS in 2019, though not without a fight. She told Fortune in 2021 about the ordeal: “I was fainting constantly, I was feeling weak.” Yet multiple doctors couldn’t figure out why. The “tired mom” diagnosis won out until she finally got proper testing.
That’s not unusual. POTS primarily affects people between 15 and 50, and it’s far more common in women than men. The condition attacks the autonomic nervous system, the part of your body that handles involuntary functions like blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. When someone with POTS stands up, not enough blood flows back to the heart, which can trigger dizziness, fainting, heart palpitations, or even blurred vision.
The list of potential symptoms is long and vague enough that misdiagnosis becomes almost predictable. Fatigue, chest pain, brain fog, shortness of breath, digestive issues, sleep problems. A woman describing these symptoms to a busy doctor might hear anything from “stress” to “anxiety” to “you need more sleep” before anyone thinks to check her heart rate and blood pressure as she changes position.
Simo’s experience speaks to a larger problem in medicine: when a condition’s symptoms are diffuse and the patient is a woman, the burden of proof falls squarely on her. Men don’t get labeled as “tired dads” with the same regularity.
Why POTS Still Isn’t Well Understood
Here’s what makes POTS particularly frustrating: scientists aren’t entirely sure what causes it. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke confirmed as much, which means treatment remains focused on symptom management rather than cure.
POTS often emerges after pregnancy, major surgery, puberty, trauma, or viral illness. There’s also growing evidence that some people who developed long-term COVID later developed POTS, though researchers are still determining why. Those with a family history face higher risk.
Treatment today involves managing blood flow and low blood volume. Some medications offer short-term relief, though their long-term effectiveness is still being studied. Lifestyle adjustments like increasing salt intake and staying hydrated can help. But “can help” isn’t the same as a solution, and it certainly isn’t the same as understanding what’s happening in the body.
That gap between diagnosis and understanding is where Simo has chosen to make a difference. She cofounded the Complex Disorders Alliance and the Metrodara Foundation specifically to fund research into conditions like POTS. Through these organizations, scientists are working toward finding actual cures rather than Band-Aids.
What Her Leave Says About Executive Health
Simo’s decision to take public medical leave for a chronic condition is worth noting. Most executives stay silent about health issues, worried about optics or stock prices or the narrative that illness signals weakness in the corner office. The fact that OpenAI disclosed this, and that Simo has already been vocal about her diagnosis, normalizes something that desperately needs normalizing: real people have real medical conditions, and sometimes they need to step back to treat them.
Over time, POTS symptoms can improve. Some might persist for years. There’s no predictability to it, which makes long-term illness especially isolating.
What makes Simo’s story stick isn’t that she’s an OpenAI executive taking medical leave. Executives get sick all the time. What matters is that she spent years being dismissed, only to eventually become someone now funding the research that might have caught her diagnosis faster. The question worth asking is how many people are still stuck in that gap, being told they’re tired moms or stressed professionals when they actually have a real disease.
