serendipti's Diaryland Diary

12:37 p.m. - Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004

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male ob/gyn.......its not his fault, or is it?

i am so so pissed right now. I had a pap smear, with a male ob/gyn, which, I thought, shouldn't matter, and it was really painful, because, he said, my uterus is tilted back, but he finished and I was okay. I told him about how I feel like death the first 48 hours of my period, and how i have passed out at the beginning twice in the past, and how I get pale and look like death and how much the pain is overwhelming and allows me to do nothing but writhe all over in extreme agony....so he is like, you should start birth control.....I was like, check with my rheumatologist, cuz i think there might be a problem with that....so he calls Dr. Chow, and Chow was like, they did studies on lupus mice that had flare ups after estrogen administration, so she cannot take any birth control with estrogen, because of the theoretical risk. Yeah, mice. So the doc was like, well, you could go with Depo or here is a script for a progesterone-only birth control, which is not that great as the mixed one for your symptoms, and is not really a great birth control. So I was like, look, I am prolly not going to fill it, but thanks. And i was also thinking, depo my ass.
And when the pap was over, he did not give me anything to wipe myself with (like one of those little cleansing towelette things) because maybe he thinks that women like having that yucky sticky speculum lube smeared all over themselves after they get a pap....so I wiped myself with some not-so-soft paper towel and left. I am in a bit of pain the whole way home, and through breakfast, thinking about his telling my my pap was painful because I am in the small minority of women who have titled-back uteri ("it's like having blue eyes"...right) and this it makes a pap more painful because he has to 'shove it all the way up.' So I come home and it takes the jeans getting soaked for me to realize I a friggin bleeding on myself!! And I am so pissed. Because not only did I not get the heads up on the possibility of spotting or bleeding after getting a pap (I just checked online and it is completely normal to bleed a bit afterwards), and not only did nobody, not the dcotor, not the nurse, give me the heads up on that....but I have even given a pap and nobody ever taught me to tell the patient that they might experience bleeding afterwards. And that this was a male doc and this happened made me more mad. And that mom told me that once she had a pap and she was going down the elevator and notcied that there was blood trickling down her leg to realize that the pap can cause bleeding.....I just feel so mad because this is just another example where a women's health is just not a priority, even in the smallest of things.
I asked Sri whether he ever got taught about the normalcy of spotting after a pap (he has had his ob/gyn rotation...homey is almost a bona fide MD...of course, the answer was no....how are you supposed to know, especially as a male, if nobody friggin taught you???) and it just made me more angry.
Medicine blows.
Changing gears, I had a bit of a moment last night. Dad's doc sent him his latest labs, with a one sentence at the beginning mentioning how his protein keeps increasing and so we will have to start therapy soon.....and 'therapy' is the truncated euphemism for 'chemotherapy' and there was no indication as to what 'soon' meant or what level it needs to increase to for that 'soon' to be 'now' and so i got on the internet and read some stuff, and then that delivered me to my 'moment' of, I don't know if I have it in me to watch my dad dying of cancer, and somehow, that is always conflated with the fact that I am not married, and somehow dad having chemo and me not being married seem directly correlated, hell, almost causal sometimes, in my head, and last night I had my 'moment' where i was a second away from completely losing it. Luckily, I was able to keep it in check, if for no other reason than nobody was really awake at the time, and my own guilt at keeping Bhakti awake prevented my from talking to her for more than a minute.
So besides fun with the speculum inserted up me, I also played the lupus card to get a flu shot today...picture this, me, in the bloom of my youth (comparitively), tall, strong looking, young and brimming with life, in a line of strictly frail, tottering, walking cane weilding, respirator using, senior citizens. They all looked at me funny. i tried to flash my sweetest smile, and
prayed for a quick turnover at the front of the line. The oncologist sent Dad immediately to get his....mom is like, i don't qualify! Mom had a bit of a moment this morning, when we were trying to get Dad seen by an orthopedic oncologist, and the assistant was being really mean-bitchy, and then she asks, what does your husband have, and as soon as she heard multiple myeloma, it was a jekyll/hyde transformation, and she instantly turned into the sweetest person and changed her entire attitude, and at the end gave my mom this loving pat on the back, and was like,we are so sorry about all this inconvenience, it must be so hard, and my poor mumbs, whose role in Kaiser is always mother/wife bulldog making sure we get the best care, with that sympathy in front of her, almost lost it, and teared up and prevented herself from crying by biting her lip and trying not to look the woman in the eyes.
I feel shitty about going back to chicago.
The fam is going through a hell of a lot right now, and I just want to be around for it, but I know that as of right now, my job is to finish as much school as I can before the seemingly inevitable chemo time happens, where I will come back and be here with them.
I just called my school to tell them i cannot take another exam on friday, if f or no other reason, then because I will fail it, so now I take it on December 29th....I am relieved, i do not think my self esteem could have taken failing an exam this friday.
I am in a weird and pensive place, and i look forward to being busy in the hospital, to be distracted away from my thoughts.
Played scrabble with Phillina and her husband Jimmy last night, and I my last word was 'ensate' which i did not know was a word, but actaully means a plant with sword like leaves.
Go figure.

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