Bitch, I lived.
So I had a long post written - one that I meant to share last week - about medical sexism and ER docs who either don’t read or ignore their triage nurses’ notes, but I don’t think I have the spoons to open up another involved discussion about it right now. Dealing with hospital representatives trying to sweep things under the rug is exhausting enough.
Instead, I’ll just say this: I went to the ER four times in one week with the same symptoms, and the first three doctors didn’t even bother to listen to me or run the most basic scans/tests. They sent me home with diagnoses of ‘muscle pain’ and ‘anxiety’. I almost didn’t go back the last time, but when I did, the fourth doc took me seriously… and that ‘muscle pain’ and ‘anxiety’ was actually three pulmonary embolisms.
Yeah.
Took me a while to process it all and the potential outcomes had I not received treatment. I spent the first few weeks in ‘holy fuck, I could have died’ mode, but I’m now firmly into ‘bitch, I lived’ mode and I’m doing a lot of thinking about what I want life to look like from now on.
