dwam:
being a female means needing to see 10 different doctors to get a proper diagnosis because they always think you’re exaggerating and/or lying
define proper diagnosis. I mean, does that just mean the diagnosis you want?
no 🙂 it means going to 10 different doctors who disbelieved your symptoms until the 11th found cysts on your ovaries 🙂 which may mean infertility 🙂 sit on a cactus 🙂
or being told not being able to walk up a flight of stairs without fainting/not being able to stay awake for more than 5 hours was ‘anxiety’ until finally the 5th doctor you saw diagnosed ur CFS/ME
It’s not getting proper treatment for over a decade because people think another female only disease isn’t real. And your insurance still does not cover your prescription even though it’s the only one you can take.
Dismissing symptoms for three years before finally sending you to a specialist and suddenly everything is happening very very fast because it is so obviously cancer.
or being told for ten years that your constant stomaches are probably caused by weird eating habits, overweight or not enough work out and suddenly your gall bladder gets removed in an emergency surgery – including about 10 gall stones.
And don’t even talk to me about being (a cis) female with mental health issues.
“Do you feel the worst when you’re on your period?”
“Yes.”
“It’s probably just hormones then, honestly.”
Or, or, OR, hormones just aggravate the problems I already experience, and I still have issues every other time of the month as well.
(I had no full explanation of what was actually wrong with me until I saw a counsellor who only asked about my mental health throughout a typical week, and didn’t ask about my goddamn period, or hormones, or whether or not I had a boyfriend or had recently been through a breakup)Yeah it means 13 years of dismissed excruciating pain before to get diagnosed with polycystic ovaries because I finally asked to be checked for that precisely.
General diagnosis : “you’re being over sensitive, it’s normal to be in little pain on your period”It means about a year of weird faintings, depressive feelings, slow brain fiction, and general weakness before someone realizes (because I asked to be checked for that again) I had the most serious anemia. It was so bad I was hardly fonctional, I should have been hospitalized, they just gave me inefficient pills.
General diagnosis : “it’s just in your head.”It means falling into depression and getting sudden personality changes because no one believes you that pill’s hormones can fuck you up that way and doctors just keep on prescribing other pills, even after I refuse to keep taking it.
General diagnosis : “nah, pill has nothing to do with your mood and sex drive”It means having a fucking bad pneumonia and agonizing for about ten days before a female doctor sent me to x-Ray my lungs. I internalized the “this is somatization” so much at this point I though I was just being a sissy over a bad cold.
I could add unrecognized and untreated PMDD, undiagnosed ADHD, allergies no one believes until tested, undiagnosed neuralgia for years cause no one believes I was in such pain, unchecked streptococcus because gynecologist didn’t believe me, etc etc.
Honestly just the question on that second post made me furious. It’s like, yeah, perfect illustration of how people never believe women !
