During my morning routine, I had a flashback to the time I went to the ER after hemorrhaging out of my yoodle-hoo for a couple of hours. I’m not talking about a heavy monthly here. I was gushing the regular stuff and thoroughly soaking an extra-absorbant every five or ten minutes.
Two things about that visit: First, the doctor who came in looked at me and asked me where my mom was. Second, the same doctor had a treat ‘em and street ‘em attitude which led to a dramatic show-down in the middle of the corridor on my way out the door.
This was about 16-17 years ago, so I can’t recall every tiny detail, but I do remember the high points, and the doctor’s self-important attitude that just pissed me off.
When he came into the room and asked me where was my mom I shrugged and told him she was dead. The look of shock and concern on his face…my mom probably snorted her Otherside coffee right out of her nose. I really think she would have been proud of my timing. I told him I was old enough to be in the ER without my mom, and he looked at the chart again and asked me to identify myself. He said something like, you don’t look 33.
Typical. That was the typical thing people would say to me back then. He was right. And I said something like, nonetheless, I still am.
It makes people uncomfortable when I do that, even though I say it with a smile.
I think he was probably around 33 himself because that’s how old he looked, but I try not to judge based on looks alone.
Later, he wrote me a prescription for some hydrocode or oxy-whatever, I can’t recall, and I got upset because he was releasing me without examining me. Somebody had come along and drained an artery, but there hadn't been another word about that. I was there for hemorrhaging out of my she-bang. I knew how much juicy flow I had lost. He never laid a finger on me. Never mentioned an ultrasound Just wrote the script and have a nice day.
I was so confused when the nurse gave it to me.
Will this stop my bleeding?
No, but it’ll take the pain away.
OHHHH, well, then I’ll still exsanguinate, I just won’t give a shit because I won’t feel it. What the hell?! How will these drugs even affect me? I’ve never taken these before. I need to be clear-headed to do my job and continue paying for the insurance that pays these hospital bills. Why didn’t the doctor examine me? Why hasn’t anybody answered my questions about my red cell counts?
These are the questions I was asking the nurse. And the nurse didn’t have any answers. The nurse was not a doctor. Least of all was the nurse the one who decided to let me go out the door without an examination. So the nurse tried to calm me down. I did not want to be calm.
He went to get the doctor, and the doctor came back all huffy, not understanding why I hadn’t taken my prescriptions and hauled myself out of there. I was taking up space in his hospital when there was a whole bunch of people who needed treatment.
Yes, I know, I told him. I’m one of them!
I’ve already treated you, he said.
Prescribing drugs is not treatment. And how can you treat me when you don’t know what’s wrong with me?
At some point I gathered up my things, and started down the hallway, and I guess that bothered him because he was trying to tell me how much more important all his other patients were, and they had been waiting for a long time to be seen, and he was following me down the corridor yelling this stuff at me and I’m crying at this point, and before I went out the exit doors that went into the waiting room I turned and faced him and said something like, YES, they are important, and I hope they get a better doctor than I got!
And he realized at that point that everybody working in the ER had paused in their work to fixate on our conversation, and he turned beet red, and there I was seeing my moment. He touched my arm in a gentle way, asking me to come back into the room to discuss it, but I was on a roll at that point.
I came here for help. I didn’t come in here for drugs. I’m hemorrhaging. People die when they hemorrhage. I don’t want to die. I want to find out why I’m hemorrhaging. I didn’t even get examined. All I got was a prescription for drugs I don’t want to take. No offense to all the really important people in the waiting room, but I got here first, and I need help!
There was a woman who worked there who came up to me and said it’s okay, honey. You don’t want to have this fight here. He’s not worth it. And it didn’t take me even a nanosecond to realize she thought we were having a lover’s spat. And he realized it too.
At that point, we were both embarrassed.
He did take me back to the room and answered all my questions and asked more questions. But by that time, our doctor/patient relationship was on rocky ground.
A couple of months and two transfusions later I got a partial hysterectomy, but I never saw that guy again.
It was a tumor, by the way, the size of a baked potato. Not malignant, just abnormal, but holy hell, an ultrasound would have found it.
