lj-writes reblogged
Credit: @ThinkAnneThink
lj-writes reblogged
I’m furious.
I’ve felt tired constantly for a long time. When I’ve told doctors this, they’ve just shrugged it off and said if I exercised more and lost weight, I’d have more energy. But if I don’t have the energy to get through my day to day life without a massive struggle, then how am I supposed to find the energy to work out?
I told my endocrinologist just in passing that I’m exhausted all the time and for the first time ever, a doctor said to me “You shouldn’t feel tired all the time, you’re young and healthy. Let’s run some tests.”
Did the tests yesterday and guess what? I have several vitamin and mineral deficiencies that cause extreme exhaustion.
Why didn’t anyone else ever think to check? She also told me that the damage undiagnosed celiac did to my body will make it a little harder for me to absorb the vitamins and minerals I need. Again, why had no other doctor taken that into consideration?
Because they saw someone overweight and assumed I’m just lazy and eat garbage all day. They didn’t even care to see the obvious right there in my medical file, that I’m a higher risk of having those deficiencies that lead to the exact problems I was experiencing and telling them about.
Doctors need to stop assuming everything fat people are suffering from is caused by and can be cured by losing weight. I could have had serious health complications and consequences if these deficiencies had never been discovered. That pisses me off. It’s negligent.
lj-writes reblogged
PSA. Very long article, but if you have high dentist bills, you should definitely read it.
“Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve internalized it as truth. But this supposed commandment of oral health has no scientific grounding.”
lj-writes reblogged
Waiting for them to call my name, hoping they never do arrgh why do I get so stupidly nervous about dental exams
I’M SUCH A PIECE OF SHIT I THOUGHT MY FEMALE DENTIST WAS AN OLDER NURSE 😂
Wow they have a lot of fancy equipment here no wonder it's a multi dentist practice --it just makes sense, they can share the equipment as well as the space
lj-writes reblogged
zanabism-deactivated20200529
if you’re not committed to antiracism, you’re not a good doctor.
I remember when I had pneumonia I was so sick and exhausted and in pain that I couldn’t get out of bed for *days* — I eventually pushed myself to walk across campus to the doctor’s office (it took me literally 45 minutes to walk there bc I had to walk so slow) and when I got there…the doctor made it seem I was only trying to get out of writing an exam lol. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I was going to be withdrawing from the class anyway bc I hadn’t had the energy to get to lectures at all that semester. She lectured me about how she sees students do this all the time and she can’t take a risk in trusting me when the only thing that was wrong with me was exhaustion. “We all have off days” is what she said lolol.
I was so humiliated at her insinuation that I eventually just nodded when she said it “didn’t seem like I had any issues” and went back home. It wasn’t until I fainted walking down the hallway like 4 feet outside my apartment that I started panicking and called someone to take me to the hospital. When I got there even the receptionists looked genuinely pale to see how hard it was for me to walk and how much it hurt to breathe or talk.
It would take *6* different antibiotics for the really advanced pneumonia to finally die out, the last of which was delivered intravenously in my arm for 10 continuous days — I still have the scar where the initial IV was and I have another mark on my wrist. I *literally* couldn’t walk or lay on my back for 8-9 weeks. I would sleep sitting up with pillows on a chair and when my breath would involuntarily deepen as I started to fall asleep I would jerk awake bc of the sharp pain my lung where the pneumonia was.
That same doctor who thought I was lying about being sick would then call me like 34 times in a row when my blood test results came to her office and the hospital sent her my chest x rays lolol, obviously worried about looking bad and having called me a liar and sending me home when I had such a serious bout of pneumonia.
In the 3rd year of my premed degree I would learn that doctors in North America — and specifically white women in nursing lol — often see south Asian women as malingerers who exaggerate their pain. In a UK study there were neonatal nurses who went so far as to say that south Asian women also lack maternal instincts, care more about their pain meds than their child and “can’t handle” child birth.
Yosif al Hasnawi — an Iraqi Canadian teen — died at the hands of two paramedics who did not believe he had been shot and claimed he was “acting” when he was actually internally bleeding. They made him walk to the ambulance with a bullet in his stomach, from which he would later die after not being transported to the hospital for 38 minutes.
Just yesterday My cousin, totally healthy, just died of a brain hemorrhage and often complained about ongoing migraines that could’ve been telltale signs of hypertension that were totally ignored by her doctor for years.
and just a day before that Kim porter who was otherwise healthy just died of pneumonia while having expressed her symptoms and pain to doctors for days — I would say that I’m shocked by this but the implications faced by brown people and racism in the healthcare system is 10x worse for black women who are often seen as liars and in it for the meds as a result of historical anti blackness and systemic rejection of black patients’ pain.
doctors are literally trained to perceive racialized people as malingerers who are trying to scam for meds or medical attention instead of people in pain. It’s 100% systemic and actually integrated into medical education.
Yeah exactly this
oakttree
Medicine is no less likely than any other field to have problems with racism. But when it’s someone’s life at stake (or at minimum someone’s comfort), it is really critical that this kind of prejudice is rooted out.
Most likely everyone’s seen this notorious page from a nursing textbook, but in case you haven’t, enjoy some piping hot medical racism:
zanabism
…this is ….published in 2014….i don’t know what to say
All of them are talking about how we pray the pain away or overreact to the pain… amazing
lj-writes reblogged
a friend of mine posted this. today is too much.
My doctor Jerry Rabinowitz was among those killed in the Pittsburgh synogogue shooting. He took care of me up until I left Pittsburgh for NYC in 2004. In the old days for HIV patients in PIttsburgh he was to one to go to. Basically before there was effective treatment for fighting HIV itself, he was known in the community for keeping us alive the longest. He often held our hands (without rubber gloves) and always hugged us as we left his office.
We made a deal about my T cells in that I didn’t want to know the numbers visit to visit because I knew I would fret with every little fluctuation and I also knew that AZT was not working for my friends. The deal was that he would just let me know at some point when the T cell numbers meant I needed to start on medications. The numbers were his job and my job was to finish my masters thesis and get a job with insurance and try not to go crazy.
I got lucky beyond words - because when he gently told me around November 1995 that it was time to begin taking medications - there was an ACTG trial for two HIV medications that saved my life. One of which I still take today.
Thank you to ACT UP for getting these drugs into a safe but effect expidited research protocol. You saved my life.
And thank you Dr. Rabinowitiz for having always been there during the most terrifying and frightening time of my life. You will be remembered by me always. You are one of my heroes just like the early ACT UP warriors- some of which I now call friend. – Michael Kerr.
Duntsch’s case is a frightening example of what happens when systems of accountability, from reporting to professional associations to civil suits, fail or are purposefully dismantled. While it’s a good thing that he was criminally prosecuted and has been sentenced to life in prison, the criminal justice system is a blunt instrument of accountability that requires overwhelming evidence and the “evidence” in this case was the trail of dead and injured patients he left while he was allowed to practice for far too long.
Fascinatingly enough, Duntsch also seem to be the product of a distinctly USAmerican fixation to work hard and achieve, and to medicate away--with cocaine and alcohol in this case--any doubts or fallout. From his fixation on playing football to the decision to be a neurosurgeon, he seems a driven, confident, and determined person just like USAmericans are told to be. He is a product of that distinctly USAmerican entrepreneurial spirit, except without the discipline, skill, or follow-through.
In the extreme and ungrounded versions of the myth of entrepreuneurship, however, it didn’t matter that his reality did not match his aspirations. All that mattered was that he believe in himself and stay positive, and the reality would catch up. He tried to do just that, leaving horrifically poor surgery outcomes in the path of his self-realization, and the systems designed to stop someone like him were inadequate to stopping him.
Duntsch is a failure, but his is more than a personal failure. This is a failure of a mindset and a system that is overflowing with can-do spirit but is dry on any sober reckoning with reality, that has no room for discipline, personal or professional, no room for setback and growth except as launching pads to even more dizzying heights of achievement. I mean this part of his supervising physician’s comments to a hospital he recommended Duntsch to?
“When asked about Dr. Duntsch’s weaknesses or areas for improvement, the supervising physician communicated that the only weakness Duntsch had was that he took on too many tasks for one person.”
This should have raised red flags right there, because it shows someone whose ambitions outstrips their capabilities, who is overstretched and cannot be up to his responsibilities in the long run. Making sure you have the time to meet your commitments is a responsibility, especially in a job as delicate and crucial as a doctor’s.
But no, this kind of overstretching is encouraged and lauded in his society and no one thought it was the serious fault it is. This is how even well-meaning people burn out and fall apart, with consequences that can be catastrophic in high-stakes jobs.
Duntsch is a shallow, superficially charming, destructive substance abuser, the kind of person that exists in any society. His specific way of being these things, however, was shaped and abetted by his society. He is a symptom and cutting him out, while necessary, was far from a cure.
lj-writes reblogged
This is a great, intersectional article with clear examples of the fat empathy gap.
Also interesting is how commenters almost immediately call the article “skinny shaming.” The mentality that empowering marginalized people by giving them a voice (and, in the case of this article, control over how they want to appear in the accompanying photographs) is somehow “shaming” the people who don’t live those experiences is a special – and way too common – kind of toxic.
Countless scientific studies have espoused the idea that a glass of red wine a day can be good for the heart, but a new, sweeping global study published in The Lancet on Friday rejects the notion that any drinking can be healthy.
No amount of alcohol is safe, according to The Global Burden of Diseases study, which analyzed levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries from 1990 to 2016.
While the study’s authors say that moderate drinking may safeguard people against heart disease, they found that the potential to develop cancer and other diseases offsets these potential benefits, as do other risks of harm. The report urges governments to revise health guidelines to suggest lower levels of consumption.
“Our results show that the safest level of drinking is none,” the report states. “This level is in conflict with most health guidelines, which espouse health benefits associated with consuming up to two drinks per day.”
Photo: Peter Forest/Getty Images for Starz
lj-writes reblogged
“scratch a transphobe and a misogynist bleeds”
siobhan o'leary gives us a brilliant deconstruction of transphobia, and transmisogyny specifically
This is some scalding hot fucking tea and I’m here for it.
Seizure First Aid.
Learn it. Share it. Know it. Use it.
100% correct medical information on tumblr for once; also consider calling 911 if you don’t know how often the person has seizures and ESPECIALLY if the seizure has lasted 5 minutes or more (which is why the watch is critical)
ishipphanaf
I have epilepsy so making sure the word is out on how to help people who do have seizures means a lot to me.
lj-writes reblogged
It’s so fucking funny to me that the Korean word for “pandemic” is the same word as “wildly popular.” It’s like Spanish flu is a must-have coat for this season or something.
It’s so fucking funny to me that the Korean word for “pandemic” is the same word as “wildly popular.” It’s like Spanish flu is a must-have coat for this season or something.
lj-writes reblogged
child handling for the childless nurse
My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old. Here’s my impressions so far:
Birth - 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal. Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.
Age 1 - 2: Hates you. Hates you so much. You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them. There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.
Age 3 - 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe. Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them. Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.
Age 6 - 10: Really cool, actually. I did not realize kids were this cool. Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn. Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”
Age 11 - 14: Extremely variable. Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other. At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult. Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers. (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)
Age 15 - 18: Basically an adult with severely limited life experience. Treat as an adult who needs a little extra education with their care. Keep parents out of the room as much as possible, unless the kid wants them there. At this point you can go ahead and offer stickers again, because they’ll probably think it’s funny. And they’ll want one. Deep down, everyone wants a sticker.
This is also a pretty excellent guide to writing kids of various ages
lj-writes reblogged
Anonymous asked:
Hi, first I'd like to thank you for your time reading this, I'm sure you get many messages. I mean everything I say with utmost respect and no sarcasm intended. So quick question: when do you think life ends? I mean officially? I'd say when the heart stops beating right? So likewise, whenever the heart starts beating, it's "alive"? Well, the heart of a fetus beats at about 6 weeks after conception, which is well before most abortions. Wouldn't that make it murder?
So I think we need to be clear on the definition of murder. Not all kiling of human life constitutes murder. Murder means a human killing a human unlawfully, or without justification. In the case of abortion, the justification is that the pregnant person declines to offer their body anymore for the fetus’s use, and since no one has the obligation to have their organs used by another this is a valid justification. Born people with, yes, beating hearts don’t have the right to take organs or bodily fluids from another person without consent, and neither does a fetus. It’s not about having a heartbeat, it’s about everyone having the right not to have their bodily organs and tissues used and changed without consent. I hope that clears things up.
Also, just a procedural note here, but the heart ceasing to beat is not the only accepted moment of death, or even a particularly good one. If it was, we couldn’t resuscitate people with CPR or maintain their heartbeats with medical devices. We couldn’t even do open-heart surgery. LOTS of things have a heartbeat, and we don’t consider killing them to be murderous. Or even objectionable. Many legal jurisdictions and medical practitioners consider death to be a process that occurs when there is an irreversible cessation of brain activity, either with a lack of bloodflow to the brain, or a lack of electrical activity within the brain. Seeing as how the brain is, as far as we understand it, the seat of consciousness, this suggests that the more valuable consideration is whether a person is capable of thought and sentience. When that ceases, and cannot be restarted, the person to whom the brain and body belong are considered dead. So if we use your logic, that the cessation of a bodily function being defined as death should mean that the commencement of that activity is defined as being alive, then we would have to look for when brain activity and conscious thought begins in a fetus. This is difficult to do. Philosophers have been confronting the question of sentience since time immemorial. As of now, we cannot realistically determine the point at which an animal ceases to be a collection of cells and starts to be a complete organism, let alone when its brain is sufficiently developed to consider it a sentient human being. However, most agree that brain activity has developed by the end of the second trimester, when the growing fetus is beginning to have measurable electrical activity in the brain in response to stimuli. This is MONTHS after the six week cutoff, and very, very few abortions take place at this stage. Let’s really take this thought to task, however. Because you are suggesting that a clump of tissue that is smaller than a typical sesame seed deserves legal protection that would require the following eight and a half months of another human being’s life be spent allowing this clump of cells to grow and develop, because it possesses something analogous to a heartbeat that could not possibly sustain it outside of the environment of the womb. Your empathy is being triggered by a simulacrum of a vascular system that predates any need for it, to the degree that you want to require a sentient being to become a life support system for it against their will for at least as long as it takes for that embryo to BECOME a human child, causing permanent changes and quite possibly damage in the body of the pregnant person. And even if that organism is alive, even if it has a heartbeat, we do not let people who provably ARE alive and have heartbeats take away the legal rights of another person to maintain the autonomy of their own bodies. Nor should we.
lj-writes reblogged
For a moment I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.
YOU FOUND A GOOD ONE
HANG ON TO THAT DOCTOR
I found a doctor like this… and I almost cried… my “bad” cholesterol was 2 points above “perfect”, otherwise 100% healthy on the tests, and she said “body size doesn’t indicate health. There are large people that are unhealthy, there are large people who are perfectly healthy. There are small people that are unhealthy, and there are small people who are perfectly healthy. Healthy isn’t a specific body size.” I love her.
daddywangsnoona
Where is this doctor so I can go
For real. This would change my life
TW: wls mention
I finally found a doctor who looked me right in the eyes, all the tests glowing on her screen, and said that I was healthy
she is incredibly nice, and I realize if I had any issues she would have been very kind and helpful, but do you know that this is the first doctor to EVER tell me i’m healthy, and not suggest gutting me like a fish to hack out part of my stomach for weight loss purposes? I’ve had walk in clinic doctors who know literally NOTHING about me, and with no tests to back up anything, suggest i get WLS
It’s been months since i met her and i’m still not entirely convinced this isn’t a long dream i’m due to wake up from
lj-writes reblogged
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief.
I didn’t know our wait was just beginning.
I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. We answered their questions: When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being worst?
“Eleven,” Rachel croaked.
As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.
“Ovarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,” says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. “High clinical suspicion is important. … Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.” The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.
* * *
There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony. Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. I felt like I could bend iron, tear nylon, through the 10-minute ambulance ride and as we entered the windowless basement hallways of the hospital.
And there we stopped. The intake line was long—a row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel. Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.
Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition. Most hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index, a five-level system that categorizes patients on a scale from “resuscitate” (treat immediately) to “non-urgent” (treat within two to 24 hours).
I knew which end of the spectrum we were on. Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight. I flagged down the first nurse I could.
“My wife,” I said. “I’ve never seen her like this. Something’s wrong, you have to see her.”
“She’ll have to wait her turn,” she said. Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.
Soon, I started to realize—in a kind of panic—that there was no system of triage in effect. The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones. It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when we’d be seen.
As we neared the ward’s open door, a nurse came to take Rachel’s blood pressure. By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldn’t get her reading.
She sighed and put down her squeezebox.
“You’ll have to sit still, or we’ll just have to start over,” she said.
Finally, we pulled her bed inside. They strapped a plastic bracelet, like half a handcuff, around Rachel’s wrist.
* * *
From an early age we’re taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely.Wait your turn. But during an emergency, established codes evaporate—this is why ambulances can run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road. I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. I kept having the strange impulse to take out my phone and call 911, as if that might transport us back to an urgent, responsive world where emergencies exist.
The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.
Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. “Stones,” one of the nurses had pronounced. That made sense. I could believe that. I knew that kidney stones caused agony but never death. She’d be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain.
By 10 a.m., Rachel’s cot had moved into the “red zone” of the E.R., a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls. She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too. He never touched her body. He asked a few quick questions, and then left. His visit was so brief it didn’t register that he was the person overseeing Rachel’s care.
Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachel’s trembling arm. We didn’t know it, but the doctor had prescribed the standard pain-management treatment for patients with kidney stones: hydromorphone for the pain, followed by a CT scan.
The pain medicine started seeping in. Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. But for the first time that morning, she rested.
* * *
Leslie Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” examines ways that different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence. In an interview included in her book The Empathy Exams, she discussed the piece, saying: “Months after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasn’t taken seriously at the ER.”
She was talking about Rachel.
“Women are likely to be treated less aggressively until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.”
“That to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,” she said. “Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.”
“Female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated”: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachel’s pain, even plain ignored it. In her essay, Jamison refers back to “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” a study identifying ways gender bias tends to play out in clinical pain management. 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,’” the study concludes—a phenomenon referred to in the medical community as “Yentl Syndrome.”
In the hospital, a lab tech made small talk, asked me how I like living in Brooklyn, while my wife struggled to hold still enough for the CT scan to take a clear shot of her abdomen.
“Lot of patients to get to, honey,” we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers. “Don’t cry.”
I felt certain of this: The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”
Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.
“My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.” Rachel does struggle with this, even now. How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings? Friends have heard the story, and still she finds herself searching for language to tell it again, again, as if the experience is a vast terrain that can never be fully circumscribed by words. Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.
For hours, nothing happened. Around 3 o’clock, we got the CT scan and came back to the ER. Otherwise, Rachel lay there, half-asleep, suffering and silent. Later, she’d tell me that the hydromorphone didn’t really stop the pain—just numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.
If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
Eventually, the doctor—the man who’d come to Rachel’s bedside briefly, and just once—packed his briefcase and left. He’d been around the ER all day, mostly staring into a computer. We only found out later he’d been the one with the power to rescue or forget us.
When a younger woman came on duty to take his place, I flagged her down. I told her we were waiting on the results of a CT scan, and I hassled her until she agreed to see if the results had come in.
When she pulled up Rachel’s file, her eyes widened.
“What is this mess?” she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.
“Oh my god,” she murmured, as though I wasn’t standing there to hear. “He never did an exam.”
The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stones—Dilauded for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, he’d never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.
If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.
“She has a large mass in her abdomen,” the female doctor said. “We don’t know what it is.”
That’s when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words liketumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because we’d asked to wait our turn all through the day—longer than a standard office shift—only to find out we’d been an emergency all along.
Suddenly, the world responded with the urgency we wanted. I helped a nurse push Rachel’s cot down a long hallway, and I ran beside her in a mad dash to make the ultrasound lab before it closed. It seemed impossible, but we were told that if we didn’t catch the tech before he left, Rachel’s care would have to be delayed until morning.
“Whatever happens,” Rachel told me while the tech prepared the machine, “don’t let me stay here through the night. I won’t make it. I don’t care what they tell you—I know I won’t.”
Soon, the tech was peering inside Rachel through a gray screen. I couldn’t see what he saw, so I watched his face. His features rearranged into a disbelieving grimace.
By then, Rachel and I were grasping at straws. We thought: cancer. We thought: hysterectomy. Lying there in the dim light, Rachel almost seemed relieved.
“I can live without my uterus,” she said, with a soft, weak smile. “They can take it out, and I’ll get by.”
She’d make the tradeoff gladly, if it meant the pain would stop.
After the ultrasound, we led the gurney—slowly, this time—down the long hall to the ER, which by then was completely crammed with beds. Trying to find a spot for Rachel’s cot was like navigating rush-hour traffic.
Then came more bad news. At 8 p.m., they had to clear the floor for rounds. Anyone who was not a nurse, or lying in a bed, had to leave the premises until visiting hours began again at 9.
When they let me back in an hour later, I found Rachel alone in a side room of the ER. So much had happened. Another doctor had told her the mass was her ovary, she said. She had something called ovarian torsion—the fallopian-tube twists, cutting off blood. There was no saving it. They’d have to take it out.
Rachel seemed confident and ready.
“He’s a good doctor,” she said. “He couldn’t believe that they left me here all day. He knows how much it hurts.”
When I met the surgery team, I saw Rachel was right. Talking with them, the words we’d used all day—excruciating, emergency, eleven—registered with real and urgent meaning. They wanted to help.
By 10:30, everything was ready. Rachel and I said goodbye outside the surgery room, 14 and a half hours from when her pain had started.
* * *
Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.” She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.
Sometimes we inspect the scars on her body together, looking at the way the pink, raised skin starts blending into ordinary flesh. Maybe one day, they’ll become invisible. Maybe they never will.
This made me SOOOO FUCKING ANGRY
I’m angry and sad and so bloody relieved she’s even ALIVE. I was preparing myself for him to say they faffed around all day and killed my wife. Because they don’t take women seriously. Women endure the pain of childbirth. We know what real pain is. We know when something is WRONG!
The accuracy of this is so intense and so scary… I feel like I’m a weird position, as a transman with SO many medical issues my whole life, to have been able to see it from both perspectives and here’s something I realized reading this…
IT CHANGED.
I hadn’t thought about it until I read this and instantly found myself looking at all my ER experiences (and there have been more than I’d like to admit).
As a “woman” I spent a great deal of time in the waiting room, clutching my sides or writing in chairs. I was told for over a year (four emergency room visits and countless primary appointments) that I had kidney stones, only to later be rushed into emergency spinal surgery to prevent paralysis for something that could have been corrected with simple physical therapy. I was threatened with not receiving pain medication if I didn’t calm down and/or accept the (incorrect) diagnosis. My desperation in these places was so great, and so difficult, that my depressed mind, with this as a catalyst I sometimes thought death might be preferable than going to the ER and I had to physically forced to seek help.
After growing more firm in my visual representation of a man, I’ve been to the ER three times and my primary countless. I can tell you right now several things: the staff was nicer, more sympathetic, and actually listened to me. I went to the worst hospital in my current area just two months ago and people said they were astonished that I had decent help… No, correction, women told me they were astonished I got helped as “fast” as I did (two-three hours in the waiting room). Doctors at all of these ER visits talked to me about what I might have, what they thought, what I thought….
I’ve received better medical help in the three years I’ve visually stood as a man than in more than twenty-five years appearing as a woman.
Our medical system was already shit. It was back then. It is now. That is no excuse for women to be treated this way. There is absolutely no reason a doctor should ever, ever dismiss a patients concerns. The truth of it is that we are in our bodies, all people regardless of any visual traits, and we know when they’re acting up. This is not okay.
And I will end this rant here to keep from diving into more details about our ludicrous medical system.
I think you guys know I already feel strongly about this, and I’m really glad there’s an article up about this from a male perspective.
yukinoomoni
This is so familiar it hurts.
gheush-christ
When I was in the 7th grade I was in the worst pain in my life. I had to limp around on my left leg because it hurt to walk. My family said I was faking the pain and no one took me seriously. I had to limp around school and my home for months before anyone was concerned enough to take me to a doctor. Once there I found out I had a huge cyst on my hip. The doctor recommended a few weeks on a crutch to subside the pain, because the other option was to break my hip. The pain went away after a few weeks, but I had to suffer for months because no one believed I was in pain. They thought I was a “hypochondriac” and “over dramatic.”
This is why we need places like Planned Parenthood. They take women’s healthcare concerns seriously.
It seems to vary from affiliate to affiliate but yes, by and large PP seems to be head and shoulders above most of the medical establishment. I have heard sooooo many stories about them being attentive to and treating pain that everyone else dismissed.
Also, a Jewish friend of mine tells me she seeks out Jewish OBGYNs because they are proactive about treating pain and listening to women.