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3:56am February 29, 2012

When your doctor:

positivelydisabled:

Expresses suburb delight at the rarity of your condition, and for some asinine reason feels compelled to inform you what a delightful specimen you are and how this will be an excellent teaching opportunity for their doctor tykes and generally bustles about in flustered excitement. 

OMG. 

I had this creepy-ass psychologist at a residential facility. And he used to tell me things like “I am so glad I can work with you. Because most people like you they put out of my reach in state institutions.  So I never get to try things out on them.”  He was, of course, one of the most sadistically abusive people I’ve ever met. 

I’ve got a neurologist right now who treats me like some kind of rare treasure.  He actually called me “a Rosetta stone” once.  He’s never actually done much to me other than show some seriously weird boundaries at times.  And he’s tried really really hard to rope me into Grand Rounds. 

And even the best psychiatrist I ever had, seemed to think (in regards to autism) that if I didn’t contribute my mind and body to research then I was throwing my life away, because I apparently had such potential to “unlock so many mysteries” or some shit like that. 

OTOH I was kind of relieved when my current GP got all excited when I brought him a pile of journal articles about my (rare, they haven’t even agreed on a name yet and when I was diagnosed there were only a handful of articles on it) movement disorder.  But that was because if I knew he’d geek out on them then I knew some doctor somewhere would have taken the time to familiarize themselves with how my body works. 

I’ve also been in some really WTF situations that involved things like… d doctor telling a med student to yank down my pants to check my level of genital development without even asking me. But that’s more like standard dehumanizing medical shit.  Of which I also have legions of stories.  I grew up with medical insurance from a teaching hospital, and my current hospital is a teaching hospital as well.  So there’s also plenty of things like getting seven biopsies instead of one so that everyone could get to try. 

(Why do teaching hospitals get so much renown yet universally suck to be a patient at?  I have heard so many stories from other disabled people that completely corroborate my experiences.)

And I can’t really count the number of times I’ve had various sorts of doctors in training get looks at various parts of my body for various random reasons. And my dermatologist actually wondered at my last appointment why I showed not even the slightest sign of modesty when she brought residents in to stare at my breasts.  

It couldn’t be because no part of my body is my own anymore?  So that I actually forget that most people have a strong emotional response to having their bare breasts stared at by total strangers.  I can’t remember the last time I cared.  

(Before my breast reduction, the skin there was so thin and fragile that a fairly light touch would bruise it in really ugly ways, and the actual weight of the breasts ripped the skin open on a routine basis.  So there was lots of staring and poking at the breasts for a long time before I convinced a doctor to cut most of them off.)