people have no idea what its like to be 14 and have everyone telling you that you’re faking and pretending to be ill for attention or to skip art class and the doctor’s telling you you’re ‘just being a teenager’ when you actually had a serious kidney disease
if someone hadn’t eventually listened to me i would have died
Please, please support self-diagnosed teenagers, don’t pretend they’re not really disabled, don’t belittle or mock them, don’t exclude them from disabled spaces and for the love of god don’t pretend you know more about them than they do
i am disabled to this day because when i was a teenage girl, my doctors didn’t take me seriously. when i said i was in extreme pain, they said i just wasn’t trying hard enough at physical therapy to repair a broken ankle. turns out they’d fucked up the surgery to fix it, and their neglect of my months of complaints meant it was damaged beyond repair. i still have mobility issues 8 years later, will have pain and require surgeries throughout my life and will, always, be disabled. because of them. because of the silencing of girls’ voices, in all spheres. because doctors do not value the voices of teenaged girls.
When I was twelve, the knee specialist I had finally convinced my mom to take me to (after years of begging) told me that my knees hurt because of my hips widening.
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I can’t walk when it happens, it hurts so bad. It’s been since I was a little kid.”
“It might twinge a bit, sure,” he told me. “Go to physical therapy for a few weeks.” I burst into tears.
My mom then refused to take me to physical therapy, because it was a long drive and the doctor said it wasn’t serious, so why should she bother? That was the start of her not listening to any complaint about my joints I ever had.
As it turns out, my knees were dislocating every couple of days. She and my doctors ignored and taught me to ignore sprains, fractures, cartilage tears, and dislocations until I moved out and learned that it wasn’t normal. I missed out on years of my life because of my doctor not only discounting the experience of a young girl, but fully blaming my pain on the fact of my being a young girl.
Listen to children when they tell you something is wrong with their bodies.
I had stomach pains for years as a kid. Almost daily. I was blamed as a faker.
I have Celiac.
People know what the hell is going on with their own bodies. If they don’t think something is right fucking listen to them.
In their study, “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” researchers Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian documented the degree to which girl’s and women’s pain is routinely dismissed as the “not real,” “emotional,” response of “fragile” females. Not only are girls and women who experience pain less likely to be taken seriously when they describe it, but they are less likely to be treated by medical professionals.
