Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick (Part III)
Posted by Moose on December 1st, 2007. Filed under: Meat Suit.(Part I is here, part II is here.)
When I finally pried my left hand off my forehead and my right hand off the cookie dough to visit my HMO, the nurse spent five whole minutes with me before shuffling me out the door with a cheery, “Use more lube and it will go away on its own!” Fortunately, I’m far too well-bred to throttle a medical professional with her own rubber gloves, so I’m saved the necessity of writing this from prison.
Sometimes it hurt to walk. Sometimes it hurt to go to the bathroom. For over a year. Let’s all pause for a moment and think about that: A year without sex, a year in which my relationship frayed at the seams, a year of feeling entirely deficient because my girl parts don’t work and I had no idea why. A year spent tamping down the primordial urge to brandish a baseball bat in the doctor’s office, so if anyone tried to shuffle me out again with no information, I could put the baseball bat to the use for which it was intended. Threatening people.
I didn’t, of course. I tend toward the meek, toward believing people when they tell me things. It took me almost a year to get enraged enough to even CONSIDER making a fuss. Or promising bodily harm. Even if that harm was only to a receptionist’s ear drums. Legend has it that one woman with this problem walked onto the fourth floor of Kaiser after many fruitless visits and began shrieking, “IT HURTS AND I AM NOT LEAVING THIS OFFICE UNTIL SOMEONE DOES SOMETHING ABOUT IT.” Amen, sister. Would that I had her chutzpah. And lung capacity.
Soon after, I was utterly chastened by the discovery that one of the best pelvic pain doctors in the country happened to practice a mere six blocks from my office in downtown San Francisco. I decided to stop spending a fortune in copays and Old Hickory maple bats and spend it instead on someone who knows his way around a broken vagina. Hallelujah. When I told the specialist that my last doctor had tried to send me to a psychiatrist – the problem being all in my head, of course – this debonair, 70-year-old man in expensive pinstripe pants started banging his sparsely-covered skull gently against his walnut desk. After my exam, I walked into the afternoon sunshine with a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and a hefty bill.
If you were wondering, validation tastes like a $500 cone of caramel fudge ice cream.
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December 2nd, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Hope! Hope! comes breaking through the nonsense that OBGYNs spout all too often.
When I went in after months of thinking it was all in my head, with a graph charting the look shape and feel of my horribly irregular menstrual flow (I’m nothing if not completely anal, and thus, I thought! helpful!), combined with the days it hurt to have sex, and the days I thought I seriously must have a rare disease, because the periods? were lasting months at a time sometimes, they told me (nothing, really, but my pap was normal, and maybe) to try upping my exercise ante.
I cried. And then contemplated a nasty letter, or five.
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:01 pm
My fantasy is to invent a machine that doctors could plug themselves into to feel exactly what we are feeling…If I could have done that with my herniated disc, there is NO WAY it would have taken six months to approve my surgery – six months in which I only sat down to drive the 2 miles to work – the rest of the time (working, eating, etc) I either stood up or laid down. Six months.
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:56 pm
I’m so glad that you got help! So many women have issues like this and are told that they are psychologically screwed. I wonder how long it will be before it is not assumed that we are hysterical.
Yay for you!
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:02 pm
A $500 cone, and hopefully, worth every lab. . . er, lap.
Chutzpah: that ever-elusive goal among us passive-aggressive types.
Hurray for the debonair, walnut-desk-&-head-banging specialist!
December 3rd, 2007 at 8:09 am
hmm, Kaiser Kaiser Kaiser HELL. I find docs jobs nation wide and cringe every time one tells me they are going to Kaiser… $500k and selling one’s soul (and medical education) to the devil…
$500 is painful but I am sure far less painful then the issue at hand!
December 3rd, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Oh Kaiser….I’ve heard so many terrible things! Would that I could turn back time and switch. However, I’m at the edge of my seat waiting for the next installment! So glad there is light at the end…
December 11th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
I’m still amazed that a man figured this out and not a woman, but thank God SOMEBODY did. Maybe you should write to the Vatican and have him sainted.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Who who WHO is this angel in a pin-striped suit?!?! I live in SF and would love to know. I’ve been suffering from vulvodynia (among other crotch troubles) for several years now with little relief. Luckily it’s not as bad as yours is… Jesus christ that sounds awful. I’m glad you finally found someone who’ll take you seriously!