2024 April 21 Healthcare for Women
Yesterday, my mom came by to drop off some medical things. Now that she is retired, her Medicare plan allows her to order medical supplies quarterly from a catalogue. I had asked for a humidifier for our back plant room, but she brought along a few other things: toothpaste, ibuprofen, bandaids.
We got to talking about our ages and how we felt. She said she’s starting to feel 70. Her eyes are a continuing problem with the Macular Degeneration. You wouldn’t know she’s slowing down though, she plays pickleball like a champ multiple times a week.
Then she said, “you’re not 40 yet, wait until you hit 40, you’ll see.” True, I’m still a half year out, I don’t actually know how I’ll feel, but… I glanced at the ibuprophen… I feel younger than I have felt in a long, long time. A year ago, I finally got the hysterectomy I had been waiting years for.
My yearly intake of ibuprophen has gone down from about 252 200mg pills to 6 in the last year. I used to have between 2 and 4 days a month of agony, causing me to feel gross, have headaches, cramps, lose sleep and even throw up. I have been to the emergency room for abdominal pain, and the outcome was “probably just an ovarian cyst”. I sometimes missed work, and almost always missed life enjoyment.
Let’s take the middle, 3 days a month for a year and there went 36 days of my life per year feeling like crap. If a man told a doctor they had been in pain for over a month, the doctor would take that seriously. As a woman, even to female doctors, they brushed it off as “normal”. When I was 28, I told my doctor how bad I felt during my periods. All she did was put it in my chart for everyone to see that I had “dysmenorrhea”, so from then on, doctors could easily see my chart and dismiss my pain as the cause was already known. Menstruation.
During that visit I explicitly asked my doctor to take out my uterus. I had no plans of getting pregnant. I am a lesbian, so there would be no surprise pregnancies. She said “No” because I might change my mind and there was nothing wrong with me. 28 year old me kept my anger to myself. I had spoken up, asked for what I wanted and shot down by a female doctor.
So here I was at 38, again in the emergency room for abdominal pain when I finally decided to push for what I needed. Ten years of over a month per year of physical pain means by now I lost an entire year worth of days to pain. I wanted out.
I scheduled an appointment with a female OBGYN, who proceeded to tell me that women need to be politically active in asking for reproductive rights and that I should vote pro-choice (OF COURSE I AM PRO CHOICE!) but then also denied that a hysterectomy was an option. She said my uterus seemed fine, but I could get an ultrasound, probably because I pushed HARD that I still needed a hysterectomy.
When I got the extremely painful ultrasound, they found many fibroids inside and outside my uterus. That could explain the pain, another doctor said. It was enough to see a specialist. The specialist did another test and said I probably didn’t need a hysterectomy since there are other options to get rid of fibroids, but did give me a list of surgeons on the back of the paper. I called every single one, and made an appointment with the first available.
For the first time in my life, I was sitting across from a female doctor who listened to me, read my charts, and set a date for surgery. I cried.
I asked about why nobody had said yes until this point. She said it’s pretty common to be denied by your OBGYN, unfortunately, since they are usually trying to keep uteruses healthy. I asked if regret is something she encounters often as someone who takes out the uterus regularly. She said not really. I’ve looked into the statistics and I can’t believe that “possible regret” is a reason to deny someone the reproductive healthcare they’ve needed.
So here I am. I’m almost 40 and I feel better than ever. I feel more free than ever. I feel more me than ever. My body feels young and healthy.
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