
i’ve learned to be frank with my doctors like an old woman & that last sentence about getting a boyfriend and learn to cope would enrage me. my softball coach voice would have come out. oooooo i am seething for you. i want to be an anger translator & peer advocate for my chronically ill people in doctors’ offices.
I usually LOVE this doctor she’s a sweet old lady and I think she meant well, but I am so fucking depressed. I already have so many things I can’t treat and with the crippling GI pain in the last year I was hoping that was one thing I could actually get under control. But now having had every possible test, scan, and exam except a bacterial overgrowth breath test (which I will BE doing in the next few days) and being told to just treat the lupus, which I am OUT of options for until (1/2)
something like T-Cell therapy comes out, I just feel stuck and infuriated being told I am “Young and healthy and will learn to cope.” I don’t know which fucking part of me is well enough to be deemed healthy so I think what she actually meant is that I am skinny and pretty by traditional standards. Because I am sick out of my gourd and back to square 0 with treatment plans
It’s doctors like her that REALLY need the reality check of what they’re saying and to have that reckoning that THEY are FAILING YOU, not that it’s no longer their problem bc they did what *they* could do. like “absolutely the fuck not you better keep trying, this is YOUR job and you better DO that job. YOU signed up to do hard shit so YOU figure it out bc YOU are the doctor.” i am enraged for you, girl. as a fellow skinny “conventionally pretty” patient (but a POTS girlie), stand your ground.
this lack of treatment and careful management of your health is detrimental to your psychological health and this old lady probably went to medical school so long ago that she barely considers it an issue, when it needs to be made VERY clear to her that she is responsible for the physical health part that maintains the balance of your mental health. if she gives up or slacks off, your mental health is no longer balanced. that’s the same for everyone like us. you’re not at square one. SHE is.