Yesterday in class, we were talking about Lorde's Burst of Light and how women weren't taken seriously when it came to knowing their bodies versus their doctor's opinions. It's disgusting how condescending professionals can be, and it still goes on today. In some instances, a woman can't get the help she needs because a doctor says there is nothing wrong with her when she knows that something is definitely not right.
When I was two years old, my grandmother called my mom to let her know she wasn't feeling well. Her lips were numb and her legs felt like worms were crawling around inside them. She continued to deteriorate over the next couple of days, and fell down the stairs. She was unable to sit still, was super restless and finally my aunt took her to the ER. When she got to there, the doctor immediately claimed that she was "insane" and diagnosed her as having a psychotic episode. She was admitted her to the psych ward shortly after. There, she was locked into the ward and stopped eating and continued getting worse. She kept falling down and finally became bed-bound, unable to walk at all. One of the nurses there noticed that she had the symptoms of Guillain-Barré Syndrome and asked the doctor to call in a neurologist to examine her. They did a spinal tap and confirmed the diagnosis. Then they transferred her to the medical floor in the hospital but the virus kept advancing, as it normally does, from the feet up to the head. When it gets to your lungs, if you are not on a ventilator, you die. Finally, my aunt insisted that they get her to Albany Medical Center for treatment and at this point, it was so advanced that she had to be incubated in the ambulance on the way up to Albany because she had stopped breathing. She spent a month there, hooked up to equipment that kept her alive. She was on all kinds of medication, which made her hallucinate. They performed what was then considered experimental treatment - plasma pheresis, which actually helped her start to get better. When the virus began to reverse, from the head down to the feet, she could finally breathe again. She had to go through physical therapy to relearn how to walk, cut her food, button her clothes, etc. Her entire nervous system was affected.
I know this story is maybe a little too much information or too personal for this blog, but I think it illustrates really well how women were treated by doctors, and this wasn't even twenty years ago. The doctors in the ER misdiagnosed my grandmother and would not listen to her or believe that she was not crazy, and neither did the doctors in the psych ward, until the nurse intervened. And even then, they did not really explain to her or my family what was going on, they just kept treating her and she kept getting worse and nobody knew what was going on, til my aunt finally insisted that she be transferred. If it hadn't been for someone advocating for her, she would be dead.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/gbs/detail_gbs.htm
This is interesting to me. Because we so often hear stories about people miraculously surviving terminal illnesses because they believed they could or because they had a supportive family, doctor friends, etc. Going by these stories, it is incredible the power that we, as humans supposedly have over our bodies. The power of the mind. I can't help but wonder if that power is diminished when society continually puts us down. That continual repression of women, specifically within the medical field has denied us power over our bodies. If we are denied that power, how can there be even a possibility of overcoming any kind of illness that infects us when the body is already infected by the mind? I wonder if your grandmother would have recovered so much quicker and less painfully if she had been given that power in the first place. I think she would have.
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