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How the medical establishment undermines, misdiagnoses, and gaslights women
In the mid-1980s, when I was in my late twenties, I jumped over a tennis net to congratulate my opponent, which is what tennis players did back then. My sneaker got caught, and I went sprawling. Hip aching, right leg strangely wooden, I made an appointment with an orthopedist. The doctor asked me to walk around in my johnnie, presumably so he could observe my gait.
“You want my diagnosis?” he said. “Nice legs.”
Over the next few years, my symptoms worsened. By now, I was married, and my husband’s insurance allowed me to see one of the most respected young rheumatologists in Boston. I wanted to have a baby, I told him, but I didn’t see how I could care for an infant, hampered by the numbness and pain I was experiencing.
The doctor said he could diagnose my problem without examining me. “You are a depressed, middle-aged woman who is using this as an excuse not to have a child.”
Ashamed to use my imaginary numbness and pain to put off parenthood, I went ahead and got pregnant. My son, who weighed nearly 10 pounds at birth, didn’t walk until he was 16 months, which meant I needed to carry him everywhere. Working full-time and shouldering nearly all the childcare and housework, I tried to ignore my pain and advancing paralysis. This went on for 16 years, until my father, in the late stages of cancer, slipped and fell; when I bent to pick him up, electric shocks went zinging across my arms and down my spine. Finally convinced my symptoms were real, I made an appointment to see the head of neurosurgery at the university where I now taught.
“Hasn’t anyone ever taken an X-ray of your spine?” this doctor asked.
No, I didn’t think so.
When the X-ray came back, this doctor — an older white man, but one who took me seriously — pointed to the vertebrae in my neck, which were crumbling and impinging on my spinal nerve. “The person who belongs to this X-ray is in a wheelchair,” he said. “I have no idea how you can stand and walk.”
Looking back, I can’t understand why I didn’t tell that orthopedist I hadn’t come for an assessment of my legs, or why I didn’t protest to the rheumatologist that, at 31…
