Image courtesy of stockimages at freedigitalphotos.net
Doctors do exactly what their title suggests: they doctor. Which, in my experience, has little to do with actually bettering a person’s well-being.
(Why the hell would there be a film called The Good Doctor if that were the norm???)
Sure, they can dress up
wounds as well as your Mom dresses a turkey on Thanksgiving. They know where
exactly to press down on your abdomen to make you fart like a warthog. Some know
where the renal fascia is located in
the body. Most importantly, they know how to recognize when they don’t know
something in order to send you to a specialist who also doesn’t know much about
your condition because “the tests just aren’t showing anything abnormal.”
Yes, doctor, but my face
is the size of a watermelon on steroids and I’m peeing blood.
“You’re medically fine. Your levels are within
normal range.”
Yes, doctor, but what’s “normal
range”? Are you sure my body fits
into that—
“Sorry, must go. Emergency
lobotomy. Time is money, Patient #293872938476!”
Oh-oh-okay. Goodbye then.
*Checks watch* But I’ve only been here fifteen minutes…
I don’t wish to offend any
doctors, nurses, or medical persons who I know personally. Medical staff can be
brilliant, helpful, understanding, and they can save lives. I’m just speaking
from personal experience here. Not once, NOT ONCE, have I ever visited a doctor
who gave a shit about me.
I mean, they saw me as an
anatomical figure in one of their college textbooks. Or a timeslot in their
ridiculously over-scheduled day. I was something that needed fixing. With
pills, usually. And the means were by tests, which, if they came back normal,
meant nothing was wrong with me.
When I was a teenager, I
had a GP who’d been seeing me for about five years. He always asked the same
questions with a generic smile on his face, sitting knees apart on his little
wheeled stool below me so as to make me feel less intimidated. How’s your diet?
Are you exercising? Is there anything new in your life?
And I answered somewhat
truthfully. But always with very short sentences. Because duh, he wasn’t a
psychologist. And he didn’t really want to hear what I had to say. The clock on
the white wall ticked. I longed to purge, Doc,
help me, for the love of god, help me. I’m sick. I don’t know how or why. But I
can’t sleep and I ache all over and I’m gaining weight and I’m sad and my
hormones are all over the place. I need balance or I’m going to crash.
He prescribed me a
depression medication only approved for people over 18.
I was fifteen.
Image courtesy of stockimages at freedigitalphotos.net
In later years, I
developed a lump on my thyroid which was screwing up my hormones. It’d been
growing since I was fifteen, and by eighteen was clearly visible and easy to
feel. Yet when he’d touch my neck feeling for weird things he never noticed the
giant nodule sticking out the front. I figured, if the doc won’t mention it, I won’t either, because it’s probably
nothing.
Then I moved to Prague and
they removed it immediately and put me on a synthetic thyroxin.
I thought, awesome!
European healthcare actually cares about my health! They want to get to the
source, not cover up the symptoms!
Wrong. They’re still super pressed for time and they’re paid much, much less to pretend to care about you
as an individual.
When I had my latest
thyroid check up with my endocrinologist just a couple days ago, I walked in,
shook his hand, and sat down. He asked me how my life was going without even
looking at me. I answered, “It’s good. I got a new job.”
“And do you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Please give me your
neck.”
I exposed my neck, he felt
it for about 2.9387 seconds, concluded it was fine, then typed something on the
computer while I sat there, tired from another night of fitful sleep, resisting
the urge to scratch at the dry skin on my face, keeping my anxious foot from
tapping on the floor, feeling utterly helpless and hormonally-screwed up.
He tossed my blood results
at me with a generic smile. “Everything’s perfect. Your levels are just where
we want them to be.”
I smiled back. “Great,” I
said. But I wanted to scream, I know the
fucking tests are fine! That doesn’t mean I’m fucking fine! My hair is thin, my
nails are brittle, I eat well and nothing changes, I go to bed and wake up at
the same time every day and still I cannot fucking sleep, I have PMS symptoms
all month long, my leg won’t stop shaking, and I’ve become a giant, horrible
cynic about life!!!
We scheduled another
appointment for seven months from now, and whoosh, I was out the door.
He’s an endocrinologist.
His thing is glands and hormones. And when I first talked to him about my
issues, with a quiet voice and embarrassed shrug, he dismissed it immediately
as not being his area. “Go to a gynecologist.” So I did. She checked me, talked
to me for about ten minutes, sweating and touching the pouches under her eyes,
and—guess what?
THE RESULTS WERE FUCKING
FINE.
Something’s not right
here. Not only do I feel completely unwelcome to talk in depth about my
physical problems, but I feel like I’m a walking numbered chart, not a unique
person with unique DNA, with a unique environmental background, a unique set of
organs that are sensitive in unique ways, a unique demeanor and personality and
mindset that affects my overall well-being… nope.
I’m a test result.
My well-being has been cut
down to fit the medical industry’s idea of what a good patient is. Someone who
doesn’t take up too much time, someone who responds well to meds, someone who
is willing to be tested and doesn’t cause an uproar when those tests show
nothing out of the ordinary. Someone who should fit into a “normal” created
just to ease the job, just like standardized tests were created to ease the
college admittance process.
A fucking cop-out. Sorry,
but the “normal” spectrum of bodily functions obviously isn’t working for me
and for many other people who feel more helpless and unhopeful when they leave
the doctor’s office than when they entered it.
I’m sick of being sick. I’m
sick of giving other people who don’t give a shit the power to decide when I’m
fine or not.
I will heal myself. I will
be my own doctor. And I will get
better. Because I know myself and I know instinctively how my body wants to work, not how it should work based on a too-wide scale of
normality.
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at freedigitalphotos.net
I’m not going to give up
on my own body, because I’m expecting it to carry me around for the next 100
years. Yes, I’m hell bent on reaching the year 2100. So sue me.
We all need to start
taking our health into our own hands. If you’ve got a knife sticking out of your
jugular, okay, yes, go to the hospital. But otherwise, you don’t need them. You
don’t need to play their money game. Their time’s-a-ticking game. You’re not
patient #293847293, you are you, and only you know what you need to do.
Go do it.
