I recently found out I have to have a rather unpleasant medical procedure. It’s nothing serious and I’m told the procedure can be performed in my doctors office with a local anesthetic. However, I have not had good experiences with doctors over the past 10 years of my life. My doctor assured me the procedure is “not that much more unpleasant than the test [i took to diagnose the need for the procedure]“.
Unfortunately for her, that test was one of the most painful and traumatic experiences of my life and the four advil she suggested I take beforehand did nothing to counteract it (and I assume the four advil she told me to take before this procedure will likewise be unhelpful). And while I will have a local, there are several things she has to do prior to administering the local (including the giant needle in a sensitive place) that I can expect varying degrees of pain from, in addition to the pain afterward, and the emotional discomfort from the sight of smoke coming from part of my body and the smell of burning I have been told to expect.
I asked my doc repeatedly if I could either be put out for this or receive a dose of an oral pain medication to help me cope with the discomfort and sheer fear the situation. She’s refused, but did agree to give me a Valium beforehand because I’m clearly not going to experience pain – I’m just being emotional. Well, I am being emotional, but only because I was in so much pain last time!
All this leads me to reflect on my previous experiences with the medical community, how many bad incidents I have had, and how many of them may have been related to me being a woman. I have no way to prove sexism in any of these cases, and indeed the offenses mostly came from female doctors, but if it wasn’t sexism then it was elitism – the assumption of the doctor that he or she knows everything about you, including how you feel or what you will feel, and the refusal to listen to what you are telling them about your own body.
I actually don’t have any childhood memories of scary pediatrician visits. I don’t really remember my early docs but they seemed nice enough and I never minded shots much. My first memorable run-in came when I was 16 and went in to get medicine for an ear infection. My mother was there and the doctor sent her out of the room and proceeded to quiz me about my sex life. Since I didn’t have one at the time I was puzzled by this, but politely told her I was not active, had never been active, did not have a boyfriend, and was too busy with school to want a boyfriend at the moment. She insisted that she could not tell my mother and that I should just tell her the truth and she could prescribe me birth control without anyone knowing. I repeated my protestations of my virginity, from which she concluded that I was a lesbian and told me I should “still use some protection to avoid STD’s”.
That alone was enough to put me off doctors. But alas, in my sophmore year of college I found myself with another ear infection and went to the campus health center to get some medicine. While I did receive medicine, I also received a lecture from a doctor I had never met before on how I was clinically obese and needed to do something about that (I am about 20 lbs heavier now than then and still not considered obese). She concluded that I was unhealthily fat without taking my BMI, cholesterol, or blood pressure measurements.
The next year I found myself at the doctor’s again, this time for Lyme disease from my job working in tick-infested forests. I had a rash on my back the size of Jupiter and could barely drag myself to the appointment. The doctor again was female, older and Chinese with a poor grasp of English. She brought with her a teenage American boy. She never explained his presence (I assumed he was shadowing her but he was much too young to be a med student) or asked my permission for him to be in the room during the exam. There’s nothing like feeling like crap on a stick while wearing a hospital gown and having a 17 year old ogle you. I didn’t protest because frankly I was too sick to care at the time but once I recovered I got really angry about it. The doctor even took pictures of my rash without asking me.
Add to this an oral surgeon who lied to me about my being knocked out for the procedure and removed my wisdom teeth while I was both awake and before the local kicked in, an orthodontist with shaky hands who cut my mouth in several places, a dentist who gave extremely painful cleanings while forcibly holding me down, another orthodontist who just plain smelled bad, a chiropractor who tried to control the things I ate, and yet another orthodontist who screwed up so badly that my teeth managed to look slightly worse after two years of braces. It’s been a rough decade on the medical front for me. Oh yes, and let’s not forget the doctor who missed the broken rib on the x-ray and sent me home with nothing!
The thing that really gets to me is that I am not a passive person. I don’t usually accept poor, rude, or inconsiderate treatment from anyone. But when one is sick, one is helpless. And even if you are physically able to speak up for yourself, you still are facing someone who, by definition knows more about medicine then you do. If they fail to listen to you what recourse do you have?
When you add up all these experiences of mine, plus the many stories I have heard from friends of similiar treatment, you have to wonder what is going on in the healthcare professional, and how much of it has to do with my being a woman and much to do with doctors being trained to be unemotional and superior. While I’m sure some of it was just the luck of the draw, I can’t help but wonder…would that campus doc have told a similarly proportioned male he was obese? Would the older doctor have asked my permission for a stranger to be in the room, or at least explained his presence, if I were a man? Would my long ago PCP have assumed I was lying or a lesbian for saying I was a virgin if I was a teen boy? And finally, if I were a man, with a male doctor, having an an equivalent procedure to the one I have scheduled for next week, would I still be getting a pill to calm my hysterics and advil to cope with the pain, or would I be supplied with a general anesthesia and so much pain medicine that I wouldn’t be able to see straight?
I don’t know the answer to these questions – certainly plenty of men have undergone bad treatment by doctors of both genders. But it feels qualitatively different to me. What I do know is that while it is too late to change doctors or postpone this procedure, as soon as it is over and I’ve had my follow up I’m finding myself a new healthcare professional. And until then, I will turn to a good friend who has a prescription for everything and get the pain medicine I need from her. I wonder how my doctor would feel knowing I had to break the law to cope with what she’s putting me through?
