as small as a world and as large as alone

11:26pm July 20, 2014

madeofpatterns:

If I meet a woman who has a strong preference for female doctors, I assume that her life has been very different from mine.

I’m not exactly a woman, not exactly not.  (Sociologically in many ways I’m a woman, gender-identity-wise I’m genderless.  Both are important parts of my life and identity, regardless of what the trans community thinks of that.)

But I agree with you.

I’ve had a small number of very good doctors.  Their gender was completely irrelevant to my care.  My four best doctors are literally evenly split between male and female – male general practitioner, female pulmonologist, female general practitioner (back in California, the one who gradually made me not think of suicide every time I had a doctor’s appointment the next day), male neurologist.  So are my worst doctors, for that matter.

If I gave up my best male doctors because they were male, I would probably literally not be alive right now.  I would be dying of undiagnosed adrenal insufficiency that was caught by a male doctor.  And I might be in danger from a neural junction disorder that was caught this week by a male neurologist.  And caught right before we were wondering “Do I really need to be taking that Mestinon dose anyway, if the problem was entirely the adrenal stuff?”  Yes, yes I do need to be taking it, yes, yes, yes, definitely, holy CRAP I wasn’t expecting that EMG to turn an abnormal result.

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