Today I spoke to a coworker who had bad experiences with doctors and was seeking recommendations for a new one, then other coworkers chimed in, and so I decided to ask you guys as well. Well, not for a doctor recommendation, but about your bad experienced with doctors?
I’m gonna spoiler mine, because it makes me very uncomfortable, so perhaps it may make someone else very uncomfortable.
uncomfortable
I had a doctor who had no business in it make me show my intimate parts (I’m intersex) and she touched them. She was curious, I guess…? She’s a psychiatrist, so, again, literally 0 business doing so. I already have trauma from regular people who treat me like a circus display, I really had no need for someone with systemic power over me using it like that…
No, I didn’t report this. I was a teenager and barely functioning at the time. :/
That time in 2004 I requested a specific kind of birth control from my doctor because I had just had a baby with the most horrific postpartum depression you could ever imagine, and I never wanted to go through that ever again.
In retrospect it’s clear that the doctor was uncomfortable with the mere thought of inserting an IUD, he had probably never done it before, and he did not want to do it. He didn’t say that, but the discomfort on his face was obvious, and he talked me up about some sort of a birth control patch like a sticker that I wear on my arm.
I did not want a sticker on my arm. I wanted an IUD.
But he sent me away with the arm sticker and I didn’t want it so I didn’t put it on. I felt hopeless and unheard and invalidated and that nothing I wanted mattered.
Two years later my husband got me pregnant again 😭
Postpartum depression is absolutely hell and I wouldn’t wish this psychological trauma on Hitler himself.
17 years later the good news is my second child turned out to be the most angelic cute brilliant hilarious precious gift you could ever imagine.