Box One
I lament the box gone missing, the new website design. Don’t worry. If you liked the multimedia box, with its breedemandweep YouTube treasures, you’ll be happy to know it will be back. I just have to figure out how to move the BlogHer ads around to accommodate my little box.
Trouble is, the coding will take me some time. Doesn’t come easy to me.
Box Two
For some reason, my other box (the really cool one that births babies and holds the secrets of the universe) has gone haywire, and that’s holding up all things mundane (html coding) and not-so-mundane (creative work, travel).
I have my teeth sunk into 2010, though, and I am not letting go.
Been having pain and various symptoms for six months, but they’ve worsened recently. So various ob/gyn medical tests have begun in earnest—and let me tell you, poor Earnest is really confused!
Trust me, I want to be grateful for ready access to healthcare. I usually feel that way. In general, Massachusetts is a great state to be a low-income, single mother with medical issues and only state-provided health insurance.
But this week, I have been sick to my stomach with a muddy mix of worry and disgust. Yesterday, I met an aloof radiologist who used my time to tell me about his life, although I was obviously frightened and in need of answers. Funny anecdote, yes, ho ho! Your wife got pregnant with an IUD! How droll!
When I stopped him, to ask questions—no, you don’t understand, what else can you tell me, I am in pain, what happens next?—he fled the scene, passed the buck. “Looks fine to me,” was all he could say.
But it doesn’t feel fine. Not at all.
This week I had a humiliating pelvic exam—totally against protocol. The doctor did not leave the room for me to change. She threw a robe at me to put across my knees, and told me to yank down my pants immediately and leave my mudcaked winter boots on. “No. Don’t take them off. Just pull them up to your butt,” she said.
At times like this—when I am not feeling well, and I am in the presence of Authority—my Catholic school past kicks in and I numbly do what I’m told. Later, I feel the shame. As if I’ve done something wrong. As if I’ve troubled them, created a story of pain that does not exist.
During the pelvic exam, when I tried to explain that yes, that hurts, and yes, that hurts even more, the doctor had nothing to say. Nothing at all. This is my primary care physician, the doctor who is supposed to know me best.
To fill the silence, I told her I had made the mistake of Googling “interstitial cystitis” and “ovarian cancer” in the same night.
Her gloved hand still inside me, she said sharply: “Why would you DO that?”
I said, “Because I was alone. And I couldn’t sleep. And I hurt. And I need answers and I’m scared. That’s why.”
I know many doctors are frustrated by patients who attempt to diagnose themselves online. I get that. But I think it would be helpful for physicians to ask themselves, Why are my patients diagnosing themselves online?…and really let that answer sink in.
I think most patients would be happy to give up weeks of Dr. Google diagnoses for one hour of compassionate care from a physician willing to explain what’s going on—more than once, if necessary.
The quickie pelvic exam took place at an office that also screwed up the scheduling of an important ultrasound. Although the office expects 24 hours’ notice for cancelled appointments, the office apparently does not expect of itself the decency to apologize to its patients when it is at fault.
At this office, I could not get my primary care physician on the phone when the pain reached a level beyond which Advil could do any good. Her gatekeepers did their job well, refusing to connect me to her, and in fact, recommending that I just take myself to the ER. Seems to me there should be at least ONE step in between, a simple step in between Advil and the ER, involving the doctor who is supposed to be yours—your guardian.
I am an active, compliant patient. I’ve never blown off an appointment. So I’m getting frustrated. And I’m scared. I’m making all the right phone calls, showing up for the right tests (the next batch begins next week), but what’s lacking is a physician here whom I feel I can trust, whom I feel is taking the pain, the bleeding, the various other troubling symptoms seriously. They are not in my head—but it doesn’t help to have “bipolar” tagged on my charts, for sure. There is a shame that goes along with that diagnosis that pops up in offices, I have found: medical offices, government offices, law offices. As if I am less, in some way. As if I make too much, too much, of the world, and thus, of myself.
But something feels very wrong inside my belly. And I don’t know who is listening, besides my physician brother, in WA state.
(Thank God for Joe! I tell him he needs to let me clone him and start a practice out here with his clone, but he’s not going for it.)
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