Stress. Anxiety. Menopause.
Without the context of experience, it can be difficult to understand how these words, uttered so nonchalantly, can destroy a person. Furthermore, the likelihood that you’ve seen this destruction in action is high, as it manifests daily within and on the front porches of our emergency rooms and doctor’s offices.
At any given moment, a woman is walking through those doors, already on the defense and calculating the differences between the problem that forces her to be there, and the anxiety of being told that, ‘it’s nothing’… again.
Her mind reels with a sense of guilt for wanting to tell the doctor that, however unfortunate, their years of medical school hardly seem worth the debt. Yet, her mind reels again with the reality that much of the knowledge from medical studies was observed with male subjects; and the statistics, oh the statistics! She knows that she’s 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed, even though 80% of autoimmune cases affect women, and yet there’s at least a 31% chance that she’ll be told to see mental health compared to the 15% likelihood for men.
But, despite all that, she can’t bring herself to overreact, because if she does, they’ll never look for the real cause again; and though she contemplates
walking out before they take her back and stuff her into another statistic, she knows that if she leaves and dies because of it, she could never forgive herself for leaving her husband that way.
So she’ll sit and wait, and when they call her name, she’ll go back. She’ll watch them perform the same tests that they did last time, thinking there will be a different result. Then she’ll remember that that’s how Einstein defined stupidity. Ope! No, she remembered it was insanity, not stupidity, and she laughs because the statistics are back, and she’ll likely be the one walking out of here with a mental health referral.
She is not crazy, and she is not alone. In fact, she’s the 2 out of 3 women that have experienced gender bias in healthcare in the last year.
How we respond to this can mimic our responses to the situation, but the fact of the matter is that, like any movement, change is the result of action by both those who are, and are not, affected by the problem.
