Theme
9:01pm May 4, 2014

A belated FUCK YOU

To this one particular doctor.

My mother took me to him.  He was only supposed to do a basic exam to rule some stuff out, so my main doctor could diagnose me with chronic fatigue syndrome, which was our only explanation back then for my sudden, severe stamina problems and other symptoms.

Instead, he talked with us at length about all kinds of things that weren’t actually related.

He said that my problems were all too “subjective”.

Migraines.  Complex-partial seizures.  Inability to urinate (the UTIs afterwards were far from subjectives).  Collapsing a lot.  Flu-like symptoms. Severe back pain (to the point of writhing on the floor screaming at times).

He said that, being as they were “subjective” and “the kind of thing that can only be diagnosed by the patient’s description”, then clearly they were all psychological in nature and not physical.

He said that my psychiatrist and my parents and my entire mental health and medical teams were hiding from me the true extent of my psychological problems, by pretending they could have a physical cause.

He said that it’s impossible to forget how to urinate, because urination isn’t voluntary.  Years later, and many many UTIs later, I got up the nerve to see a urologist.  He did an imaging study which showed spasticity in my urethra.  I got physical therapy and an implant to help me pee, and everything is better.

He said that it’s impossible to think in pictures because everyone can only think in words.  My mother had told him she was a picture thinker.  He basically accused her of lying.

He said that if I simply didn’t think about my symptoms, at all, then they’d vanish, because they were only caused by my thinking of them.  

They didn’t vanish.  I tried not thinking of them.  It only made them worse.

Now I know I have adrenal insufficiency.  And all I can say to that doctor is fuck you.  Fuck you for destroying my confidence so badly that I didn’t get treatment for many things for years.  Fuck you for making me wonder, while I was sick enough to die, whether I could think away my symptoms.  Fuck you for all of it.

If he’d taken a look at my symptoms back then, maybe he’d have taken a look at my pituitary and found what was wrong.  Maybe.  But we’ll never know because he was a jackass.