Today I spoke to a coworker who had bad experiences with doctors and was seeking recommendations for a new one, then other coworkers chimed in, and so I decided to ask you guys as well. Well, not for a doctor recommendation, but about your bad experienced with doctors?
I’m gonna spoiler mine, because it makes me very uncomfortable, so perhaps it may make someone else very uncomfortable.
uncomfortable
I had a doctor who had no business in it make me show my intimate parts (I’m intersex) and she touched them. She was curious, I guess…? She’s a psychiatrist, so, again, literally 0 business doing so. I already have trauma from regular people who treat me like a circus display, I really had no need for someone with systemic power over me using it like that…
No, I didn’t report this. I was a teenager and barely functioning at the time. :/
That time in the year 2000 I had gotten extremely ill and I had never felt such peculiar horrific illness in my life, it was like a flu but worse and weirder and I felt like I was going to die because I couldn’t eat I couldn’t stand up, (I’m normally an extremely healthy active person), this went on for a couple weeks and I lived alone which made it impossible to see a doctor because I couldn’t drive myself in that condition,
but thankfully I had a spiritually intuitive friend who had a feeling she should call me and thankfully she did and she arranged for one of her friends to drive me to the hospital.
So I saw my primary care physician and he was very dismissive of me. When he came into the room he saw me laying on the crackly paper bed and he insultingly thought I was faking sick and trying to get out of work, and told me to sit up. He mockingly said “oh you’re not feeeeling well?” He troubled himself to run a throat culture on me then sent me home. I was not feeling well enough to go back home and die alone.
The next day my same friend arranged to come pick me up and take me to the emergency room where they admitted me into the hospital.
I was hospitalized for 2 weeks apparently I had cytomegalovirus, and they ran all kinds of tests on me including general anesthesia for throat probe down to my intestines, an eye exam for some reason, but mostly those two weeks were a complete blur to me, I mostly slept all the time.
The husband and son of my friend came to pick me up from the hospital when it was all over, and I was recuperating at home for another week before returning to work, when I got a phone call from my original primary care physician and he said “You know what, your throat culture came back looking a little unusual.”
I’m like
“No shit! I was just hospitalized nearly dead for 2 weeks. Now you’re calling me a month later telling me my throat culture was slightly abnormal? If I’d waited here all that time for your phone call, I wouldn’t have answered the phone because I would’ve been dead. Thanks for nothing.”
I didn’t actually say all those things to them, we don’t think of how to respond to such things until years later.
I’m so sorry. Bless the person who saved your life. And bless doctors and nurses who treat patients well. A faking patient will show up on tests. A denied non-true patient may die or suffer life-long consequences. There is 0 reason to deny people medical care.
If it helps, the doctor had actually reviewed your entire chart before calling you. He already knew he was an idiot, but whether he had the emotional maturity to understand it is a different question.