Dear Doctors, I Know My Body: An Open Letter to the Male, Medical Professionals Who Blew Me Off as…

Dear Doctors,

I’m sure you don’t remember me. I am just one of many young women who you have crossed paths with over the course of your career.

I appeared in your ER late one evening, a wreck. Earlier that night I had experienced insane chest pains, that lead to me passing out from a siezure like episode, and the next thing I knew I was in your ER. I felt like I couldn’t breathe or move. My eyes felt swollen. The room was spinning and I was so disjointed that I was only catching about 20% of the things happening around me. In the months that have passed since this incident I have managed to regain memory enough to articulate this night. As I was trying to take in my surroundings and piece together why I was there in the first place, I heard one of the paramedics that brought me in say to you, “I don’t know man she’s crazy. They said she just freaked out, out of nowhere.” You laughed at this remark. In that laugh you decided “They” were right. In that laugh you decided I wasn’t worth the time your medical degree took to get.

It must have only been a few minutes later, (but it felt like a century) one of you came over to me and began “working”. You yelled at me to move, and when I expressed I couldn’t, you yelled again. Then you decided the next best course of action was to hold my mouth shut and hold smelling salts up to my nose. When this course of action didn’t work immediatly, you eloquently said, “Go ahead and fight it. I have more where this came from.” Your words were dripping with the undertone of, “This is a waste of my time”. You considered me a waste of your time.

At some point someone must have gotten an IV in my arm because the next thing I knew you were condescendingly saying to me, “We are going to give you something to calm you down. Okay sweetie?” Except what you gave me didn’t calm me down. In fact it made my heart pump even faster, and the weight in my chest get heavier, and my worries go through the roof. At some point my god send of a roommate showed up and you treated her presence with the same distate you treated me with, and then the people who had caused me to end up in your presence to begin with showed up. I don’t know what they said to you but whatever it was must have been dripping with knowledge because when you came back to me you said, “You just had a panic attack. That’s it. Get some sleep.” I tried and tried to tell you something was was not right, but I of course don’t have a medical degree, so I of course was wrong. I didn’t realize that the people who sent me to you did. MY BAD. Or maybe it was just because they were men and I was a woman. What do you think doctor?

You gave me something to make me sleep and the next thing I knew I was waking up in my bed at home, disoriented and confused, trying to piece together the night and figure out what was memory and what was fiction. I stumbled around the rest of the day. Forgetting conversations, crying, and reading the papers on panic attacks you had sent me home with. At the time I couldn’t remember much, but the feeling that I had been mistreated when I was scared stuck to me as if by super glue.

Flash forward a few months. I am walking through the woods behind my Aunt’s house with my Dad. I’m screaming in the phone to anyone in your hospital system who will listen. I’m hysterical. I will NOT take no for an answer when they try to brush me off. I’ve just recieved the worst news anyone can recieve. I have cancer. I have a tumor the size of an egg in my chest. It’s been growing there at the VERY LEAST ten months. It was there when I came into your hospital.

I finally get through to a patient advocate and a few hours later I’m speaking to your boss, a woman. I’ve calmed down by now and have my best diplomatic voice on. I’m speaking calmly to her, explaining what you did to me. She tells me that she’s looking at my chart. She tells me exactly what you wrote down that you did. She tells me you gave me something to “calm my nerves” and a pregnancy test. I say to her, “So the bare minimum?” and she reluctantly says, “yes”. She then goes on to tell me that you also noted in my chart, “complaining of chest pain. Has rapid heart beat and spasms”. I jump on that immediately. See, I’ve been to enough doctors at this point to know that those are all signs to do a CT Scan of my chest. Those are all indicators of this little cancer known as Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and ALSO I am a textbook case for it. You see Doctor, one of the symptoms of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is “panic attack like episodes”. In fact, many of my fellow survivors had them. She tells me you were ER doctors and therefore wouldn’t know to look. I tell her that an ER Doctor found my tumor. She goes silent. I tell her how you held my mouth shut with smelling salts. She describes your behavior as, “disgusting”. I agree.

She then goes on to apologize on behalf of you. I will say to you now what I said to her then. I don’t blame you for not finding my tumor. I understand it was found very coincidentally. I blame you for not listening to me. I blame you for listening to absolutely everyone except the person you were treating. I blame you for doing the bare minimum and then patting yourself on the back. I blame you for writing me off as a “sad girl being dramatic”. I blame you for noting problematic things in my chart and not looking further into them. I blame you for talking to me like a three year old and treating me like a waste of time. I blame you for not taking the time to make sure there was no stone left unturned. I blame you for being rude to every single women I saw you interact with that night. And I mean EVERY women, from me, to my roommate, to the nurses (who were pretty much the only positive interactions of the night). I blame you for telling me I was over reacting when I clearly wasn’t. I blame you for making me feel like I was “crazy” and listening to other men when they told you I was. I blame you for being mysoginistic, sexist, and every other word in the book. I blame you for not being an advocate for me. You were the people I should have been able to trust the most and instead you are the ones I trust the least.

That experience left such a negative impression on me that I have developed a bit of PTSD when it comes to having to go to the ER. I become terrified that the people who are supposed to be treating me wont believe me when I express concern. I feel the need to tell them about that experience with you, and make it clear that I need to know they have my best interest at heart. I immediatly freak out when I’m told I’m going to the ER, even more if I have to ride in an Ambulance, because I am so scared they will be mean to me. I’m so scared they won’t believe me.

You may be wondering why after almost a year later I am now addressing this issue publicly with you. Well I’ll tell you why. Because I am not the only one with a story like this. A fellow survivor told me that she was brushed off as having a panic attack three times before she was finally taken seriously. Another was brushed off as having phantom pains when her appendix was actually leaking into her body. A family friend spent over 10 hours in the ER for what turned out to be a burst cyst on an ovary, but for hours was told, “sometimes girls have stomach pain”. Most recently, I was in a Lyft with a woman who herself is a Doctor, and she still wasn’t taken seriously and then later was diagnosed with MS. For months, I have told my story and listened to others, but it was always behind closed doors. Never publicly. Subconciously I think I was protecting you. But why should I extend that courtesy for you when you did not extend the same for me?

For months I have mulled over what damage you did to me. I have tried desperatly to heal from it. To not let it affect me every time I walk into a medical situation. But it has been hard. It was with me when I was misdiagnosed multiple times before finally, on the brink of death, I was diagnosed with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It was with me when I went to the ER for abdominal pain and came out with an appointment to see an oncologist. It was with me when I rode to the ER in an ambulance after my first chemo, begging my Dad not to leave me alone with the paramedics, and also two months later when I went again for a seizure like episode. It was even with me a few weeks ago when I went to the ER for what turned out to be a Pulmonary Embolism. In each case the poor Doctors treating me had to listen to the tail of you and reassure me that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes you did.

I want to take a moment to thank the ER Doctors who did take me seriously. Who listened when I said, “I know my body. Something is not right.” Who left no stone unturned. Sometimes you misdiagnosed me, which sucks, but you did so AFTER doing everything you could think of, not before. You did not look at my age or sex and decide that I was not worth your time. You shut down anyone on your team who did begin to treat me that way. You saved my life THREE TIMES. In your work, without even knowing it, you have slowly begun to restore my faith in medical professionals. I am forever grateful to each and everyone of you.

So, to end Dear Doctors, I ask that you do better. BE better. Do not look at twenty something year old women, scared out of their minds, like they ARE out of their minds. Do not assume that what is between your patients legs, determines their ability to distinguish between what is and what isn’t normal within their bodies (and this goes both ways!). Keep in mind that your patient lives with themselves 24/7 and so they know if something is off. Remember that we are counting on you. We are putting our trust in you. Don’t abuse that trust. Lastly, I want you to know that I am going to move past the damage you have done. I haven’t done it quite yet, but it’s a goal of mine, and I am not a quitter. One day the lasting affects from you will only be the positive ones, like how I have become an advocate for myself and others in regards to AYA health. I have decided for my sake to forgive you for what you did. I emphasize for MY sake. However, I will never forget.

With strength and courage,

Lani Skelley