I do my best to avoid doctors at all cost.
No, I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I firmly believe in the importance of medical science.
It isn’t the science I’m avoiding, and it’s not because I have anxiety about calling and making my own appointments; it’s the doctors I want to avoid. Women have died from pain not being validated and investigated, and they’ve also become sterile reproductively from this issue as well.
Not once have I come in contact with a male doctor who hasn’t tried invalidating my pain; and I’m talking doctors at hospitals, physical therapists, etc.
Did you know that women are less likely to be treated as aggressively as men until they can prove they are just as sick as men?
Please tell me how women, most of which get to experience severe pain men can’t even handle for at least a week out of each month, not know how their bodies are reacting to certain types of pain? Or women who literally tear to their rectum during childbirth not know when a certain type of pain is not right? Check out these men who tried to simulate labor pain and note their reactions to just the littlest amount of electrostimulation.
And it isn’t an issue just with pain being taken seriously: it is with reactions to medications too.
For instance, I have medication that is supposed to help me with anxiety, depression, and ADHD, prescribed by my doctor.
When I went in after a month for my medication check, I expressed some serious concerns.
This medication was:
- Making me feel numb and no emotion
- Still wasn’t helping with my ADHD
- Had completely stopped my period
- And still had period cramp pain around when my period should have come, but on an even more intense level
I wasn’t pregnant, and I wasn’t on any other medications; not even birth control. So I searched medical discussion forums to see if anyone else had these issues with the medication, and what the medications side effects were.
Little did I know that this medication was known to make people even more suicidal under the proven side-effects. Yet what wasn’t listed on any of the side effects was how it might impact a woman and her reproductive cycle. However, there were still 35 pages of 40-50 responses each underneath the description of this medicine, all of which were women expressing the same concerns as me; this medication had messed up their reproductive cycle the moment they started the medication. It varied from stopping periods completely, to more intense period pain and heavier periods, to “ghost periods” where you get all the symptoms of having a period, without the actual bleeding part, and also to more frequent periods.
Most women have regular periods, and we know when something is wrong. When I expressed these concerns to my doctor, he said, “oh well that isn’t listed as a side effect. How about you stay on it for a few more months?”
When I said I wasn’t comfortable and wanted to switch medication because I couldn’t go through another month of pain like that, he again told me to stay on this medication that wasn’t even helping the original mental health issues.
Like I said, every male medical “professional” I have had thus far in 22 years of life, has invalidated my pain.
In another instance, I was about nine years old, and my mother was giving birth to one of my younger siblings. I distinctly remember her complaining over and over about pain and contractions, as expected. However, when she went into labor and asked for the epidural, she repeatedly screamed between contractions “my left side isn’t numb!” The nurses kept telling her, “it’s fine, it’ll kick in here in a little bit!”
Hours went by and my mother was now screaming, “THIS IS MY THIRD CHILD I KNOW HOW AN EPIDURAL WORKS IT SHOULD HAVE KICKED IN BY NOW GET ME THAT MEDICATION SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT.”
They never gave her more medication because they didn’t believe her, and she gave half-natural birth to a breech child. For those of you unaware, a child should come out head first.
Breech births have a 33% increased chance of experiencing an injury or death during the birth. It is harder for the mother to push the child out, as the child usually comes out folded in half, making it larger than it normally would to push through the vaginal canal. My mother knew something was wrong starting with the epidural and the amount of pain she was experiencing in the first place.
She still wasn’t taken seriously despite being through multiple births already.
Honestly, how many more women have to suffer and/or die before we will be taken seriously?
If you’re curious to see just how common this issue is, here are a couple more first-hand accounts you can read besides the ones already linked.
