January 25, 2024 | OPINION | By Sofia Joucovsky
This past August, I ended up in urgent care. It was 11 p.m. and I had stabbing abdominal pain in my lower right side. I was nauseous, and I was so scared I would have to get my appendix removed about 1,000 miles away from home. Fortunately, and in some ways, unfortunately, it wasn’t appendicitis. It was something that would have never crossed my occasionally-hypochondriac mind.
I was wearing a cropped tank top (I think called a brami). I pulled on a pair of men’s extra-large sweatpants. I was in pain, and I figured it did not matter what I wore. I called Kaiser Permanente, asked them which urgent care near me had the shortest wait time, and they told me it was Tyson’s Corner Urgent Care in Virginia. I called a Lyft, texted my parents in Denver to let them know what was happening and finally arrived at the urgent care.
I waited for 20 minutes. I stared around at the families and seniors waiting alongside me. I wondered if I was being ridiculous, if this pain was psychosomatic.
I was triaged and brought to a dark room. A little while later a white, male, middle-aged doctor quickly saw me. I was exhausted and in pain and wrote off his rudeness as me being dramatic.
Someone came in to take me to the ultrasound room and handed me a gown. I asked if I would have to get naked. The woman looked at me warily. I had asked why, and she gave me vague answers until I figured out the doctor had been made uncomfortable by the top I was wearing.
He completed at least four years of medical education, learned about the human body, and fulfilled at least two years of residency, where I am sure he saw unclothed people in many different states and forms. But in a quiet urgent care in the suburbs of Washington D.C., he found himself uncomfortable by an anguished 19-year-old’s breasts.
It was almost midnight, the ultrasound technician was about to get off, and she warned me we had to make it quick. Every time I winced and whimpered in pain, she looked at me like I was ridiculous – until she did not. She left the room, came back, apologized about not being gentle, and I was brought back to my room.
I was told I would have to get an MRI — no one told me why or anything else about what was going on. I stubbornly refused to wear the gown. The professional medical staff had to deal with my outfit. They gave me an IV of pain reliever and left me alone. I can’t remember if it was before or after the MRI that I saw the results of the ultrasound.
It said I had an ovarian cyst. It was over seven centimeters wide and over seven centimeters long and was apparently what was causing my pain. I Googled it and of course the first thing that came up was cancer.
I started crying. I was worried I would not be able to have biological children. The nurse told me to calm down. I was being ridiculous. I sat in that room until six in the morning, when the doctor came back and informed me that I was fine. There was no torsion, that although it was causing me pain, it wouldn’t kill me. I tried to ask questions about what to do. He rolled his eyes and gave me one-word responses. I asked what caused the cyst, and I don’t think for the rest of my life I will ever forget his response:
“When you people menstruate, you get cysts sometimes.”
In my head, I shouted “YOU PEOPLE!?” I felt targeted, like I was being hysterical (which comes from the Latin word for uterus) because I was a woman. I wanted to call him sexist, but I was so tired and scared, and I just wanted to sleep. He told me I also had bowel movements pushing against the cyst, so I asked what caused that. He looked at me like I was the dumbest person he had ever encountered.
“Bowel movements?” he asked. “It’s constipation.”
I wanted to know the root cause of my problems, why I was in pain and what was causing all of this. I tried to articulate that, and the doctor shrugged me off and told me if it burst, I would be in pain but that would be it.
I asked what I should do. He told me if I was concerned, I could see a doctor when I got back home to Denver. Like I was being dramatic about something the size of an orange on my ovary.
I got back to where I was staying at 6:40 a.m. I told my parents what happened, scheduled an appointment with my gynecologist, took Ibuprofen and MiraLAX, and tried not to wince every time a movement caused some part of my body to push up against the cyst.
The next day was the last day of my internship, and I told my coworkers about what happened.
One coworker told me she had once gone to the hospital for pain. The male doctor had told her she was passing gallstones, and she would be fine. He refused to acknowledge her pain or run further tests. Eventually, someone did an ultrasound on her, and the torsion I had mentioned earlier, the twisting of a cyst around the ovary, happened to her. The doctor had not listened to her for hours. She lost her ovary.
Another coworker told me about multiple experiences she had where doctors didn’t listen to her. She told me I should report the doctor, but I didn’t even know how.
I saw my gynecologist, who of course was far more sympathetic, answered my questions and ran all the proper tests. She told me if it didn’t go away, I would need surgery. Three months later, surgery was scheduled. Thankfully, as we nicknamed it, Cystopher Columbus (because it colonized my ovary) went away.
But in Block 1, I couldn’t leave my bed somedays because of how much pain I was in.
Fortunately, the pain went away. But during that experience, myself and all the women I spoke to lived the experience of affluent white women.
According to Planned Parenthood, women of color, queer people, low-income people, or people who identify as all the above tend to face far worse reproductive health care, than their white cisgendered female counterparts. Black women are almost three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. This country clearly has a problem in treating all patients who require reproductive healthcare.
MedicalNewsToday states that “stereotypes about gender affect how doctors treat illnesses and approach their patients.” For example, a 2018 study found that doctors often view men with chronic pain as “brave” or “stoic,” but view women with chronic pain as “emotional” or “hysterical.” The study also found that doctors were more likely to treat women’s pain as a product of a mental health condition, rather than a physical condition.”
So many people with uteruses have had awful experiences, where our pain and our issues are not listened to. Not only do we need to work on making things better, but in order for that to happen, we have to acknowledge how serious the problem of inadequate reproductive healthcare for women is and how many people have had to deal with this.
People cannot understand the issue if they have never faced discrimination from a doctor, never struggled with chronic or painful health issues, or have access to quality, affordable healthcare. I want to write a series on Colorado College students experience reproductive healthcare, to show how common this issue is. I figured I would start with one of my own stories.
https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/health-care-equity#:~:text=Regardless%20of%20income%2C%20health%20disparities,which%20are%20worse%20in%20the [S(1]