Being Heard, Believed, Not Killed

How to self-advocate at the doctor's office, get treated, and not die when you walk in as a woman.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

I’ve already told this story in both Ladyparts and Hell is Other Parents, but it bears repeating: once upon a time, I walked into my primary care physician’s office with a burst appendix. I did not know I had a burst appendix. I just knew I was in such extreme pain that I’d hired a babysitter for my infant son and even sprung for a taxi, as walking up and down subway stairs seemed impossible. My regular doctor was not there, so I saw her partner, a man. “My stomach hurts,” I said.

“It’s gas,” he said.

“It doesn’t feel like gas,” I said.

“Take some Mylanta, you’ll be fine,” he said. He handed me a sample of the drug.

“Trust me, it’s not gas. I know what gas feels like,” I said. “This feels impossible to endure.” Was I being too stoic, so he wouldn’t think I was hysterical? Or was I being too complainy? Hard to know, when you’re a woman, and—this is statistically provable—you have to walk that fine line between the two to be heard let alone treated.

Did he know that postpartum women over the age of 35 have an 84% greater chance of coming down with appendicitis than the general public? Hard to tell. Did I? Certainly not. But I was 40, and I’d just had a baby, so yeah, oops: red alert.

Five minutes later, I passed out in the waiting room while paying the bill. “Oh, come on!” the doctor said, rolling his eyes and standing over me with arms crossed. “It can’t be that bad.”

I told him it was so bad, I thought I needed an ambulance. He said, “You’re fine.”

I was, suffice it to say, not fine. And I’m lucky a kind stranger outside the doctor’s office saw me struggling to walk and flagged down a taxi. “Take her to the closest emergency room,” he said. “Now!”

Several long hours later of being chastised by hospital security for lying prone on the dirty emergency room floor, because it was the only position that didn’t make me scream, I was finally wheeled in for an emergency appendectomy after my husband eventually showed up to yell at people.

What could I have done differently? Hindsight is always 20/20, and what I did right was to immediately leave that primary care practice and find a new (and amazing) doc, but I finally have a book not only to explain me what I did wrong but also to teach me—and you—how not to die. Or at least how not get dismissed or given the wrong medication or deprived of emergency treatment because your doctor failed to recognize your symptoms as those that lead to, say, a heart attack, because they look so different in women than in men.

Written by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mary I. O’Connor and medical anthropologist Kanwal L. Haq, Taking Care of You: The Empowered Woman’s Guide to Better Health is a step-by-step guide for women to advocate for themselves at the doctor’s office, broken down condition by condition. And look, yes, I know, I wish we didn’t need this book! But the sad truth is we do. Too often, our pain gets dismissed. Too often, women die for lack of being heard.

I spoke to Mary and Kanwal yesterday over Zoom. And I asked them to answer a few written questions and to provide a sample chapter (on knee osteoarthritis, so common in women) so you can see how the book works. You can find all of these materials below.