Ignorance in Women’s Healthcare

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The following is for informational purposes only. For medical advice, please see a medical professional.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Welcome to Staying Alive with Margaret and Susie. And we have Regina back subbing in for Susie. I mean, we we want to have guests in the future, but we want Susie here too. But she couldn't be here today. And so I I told you guys we were going to have a part two with Regina. And because we've been talking about uh the way we as women are treated within the healthcare system. It comes up a lot, starting when we go through menopause, that suddenly we have, as these hormonal changes are happening, suddenly we have aches and pains in our bodies that we've never had before. And and our male counterparts, the same age, they're not going through the change we are, you know, and so they're not experiencing it, and there's so little understood at least 25 20, 25 years ago when we went through it. There was so little understood then, and not a heck of a lot more now, as to why are women feeling so different just dramatically uh when we suddenly have these hormonal changes in our body. And so we want to talk about in part two what our experiences have been like within the healthcare profession when we're going in with aches and pains, which for me very much started out as musculoskeletal issues because those hormonal changes really affect like the strength of our bones and things like that.

SPEAKER_02 1:58

And so anything you want to say at this point or really most of my experience around menopause and medical dysfunctions is around my mother's story. I kind of have had a pretty non uh uneventful menopause year.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

So you can tell us about that a little bit if you'd like.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Um, yeah, my mother had early hysterectomy. So she was in her early 30s, uh having had three children. I think she had four full birth terms, four pregnancies, but three me and my sisters, um, and they discovered a large tumor on her uterus. And our family doctor referred her to a specialist who removed it, and it was benign, but it was very large. Um, and as a result of that, she had a hysterectomine.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 3:02

So her physical chemistry was, I think you could say, really goofed up. She was really young. She went on birth control pills not too long after that. So this is during the birth control revolution for women. Everything was changing really rapidly. My mother was a working woman. Um, so she was continued to seek support and advisement from our family doctor who, about this time, and mind you, me and my sisters were all moving into our teen years. So it was kind of a rough emotional time for my mother. Um, and she the doctor gave her lithium. I think my mother was experiencing a range of hysterical emotions. And I say hysterical because I think historically that is the way that women's problems, pains, experiences were characterized by the medical establishment. You know, you're just making it up, or you know, it's rough. I know you're bored at home. And uh, and so this was she was given a prescription of lithium.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Can I tell you tell the audience something? Because the this is important. I on both sides of my family had women that when they went through the change, they had all kinds of like psychosis type things. I had an aunt on my father's side who believed that there was electricity shooting out of the electrical outlets. I had uh an aunt on my mother's side who was seeing visions of Mother Mary. I mean, these hormonal changes that we go through as women, they are huge. They are huge. For those of us who haven't had those extremes, we figured out other ways to help calm our body down with these hormonal changes we're going through. But I'm I'm I'm sorry that your mother went through all that. It it sounds like the it sounds like the the hysterectomy was definitely needed. But are you saying that you you didn't have any of that? Like you you take after your father's side or something or something.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

I just I I I don't know if my seeing what my mother went through because it continued on. She was very dependent on medical establishment for attention seeking, and she had a lot of things that she went to benevolent males to help her with. And she wasn't helped, but I don't know if she saw that or if she even cared. I think given the situation between my mother and father, my mother just really believed in medical establishment to provide the protection and care that she wasn't getting from my father, I guess. I mean, I don't really understand all the psychological underpinnings, but I do believe that she was treated as hysterical. She was not treated as a rational person in the main. And I think this was from a very benevolent family doctor. He treated me, my sisters, my father, and um he was a really nice man. Uh, but I just think my mother was part of that population that was, you know, the target of mother's little helpers. And her lifestyle was not the lifestyle of a privileged middle class woman. She was a working, working class mother, and she had an incredible amount of pressures on her.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

And I don't think she was ever heard. She was pitied by the medical establishment. And I think I'm sure our Dr. Newton gave her lithium, thinking it would help her calm down. And how long was she on it and what happened? I don't know. My mother took a lot of medicine, a lot of pills. Again, that informed me because uh I think my lifestyle is very different from my mother's in so many ways. So I never was surprised at how different we were, but my attitude was sort of more like my parents when I was growing up. You don't need to go to a doctor unless you're sick, the common ailments we can treat with, you know, apple pie, uh, an anima, or you know, a lot of fluids. And so that was kind of mine.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

That brings up to me that like just the whole idea that just treat it with a pill, what whether it's physical aches and pains or something emotional, figure out a pill to treat the symptom when a lot of times as women we were dealing with a hormonal imbalance that could have easily been rectified and should have been rectified, and and we now know can be rectified right when we go through the change and continuing on. And and no matter what age you are as a woman, talk to your doctor about hormones and and what that can do for you. Anything from preventing bone loss to brain fog and a whole variety of things that hormones affect.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

Well, it's interesting you mentioned bone loss because that is one of the things that I began to uh I had uh become identified as osteoporosis, something that my or osteopedia, I'm not sure. Osteopedia, the one that is less uh invasive, but I remember my mother telling me, oh, black women don't get that, you know, and there is a lot of things like that that I think overlap the medical system, were generally treated as super strong, pain resistant. And because those things are sort of true of me, then I have had to learn. I I it just didn't, I've I've always been outspoken, but I haven't always known what to advocate for. It's been my own process of learning. Yes, my body is telling me, not what I'm being told is happening to me. So I do think both things go together because I'm have a high tolerance for pain, but that's not an excuse for you know bad treatment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Well, let's uh we could spend hours on this topic, so let's vote fast forward to the process around your hips. Oh right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

So initially, yes, um, my doctor recommended me to a specialist because I've been complaining about it, and it was uh kind of like I think he I want to say he was a sports medicine, but this was his specialty arthritis, hips, and he was very friendly and nice. He kind of looked me over, he looked at the um, he right away said, This is bursitis, it's not curable. What are you doing? You know, I can tell you've used your body a lot and it's done you well. What do you do now? Keep doing those things. So the yoga's good, saunas are good, walking's good, all of that's good. You got to keep that up, and right now you have to get do, I would say, like an A minus will get you to a place where you don't have to be quite as vigilant. Like if you're just B plusing it, you'll be fine. And but there is no cure. And so I kind of went with that for a while, and then at the next time I went to visit them, we look at the x-rays, and I was shocked. The x-rays, there was nothing separating my hip socket from the hip bone. All of it, you could see it was all eaten out, there was no cartilage there. There was nothing, it was bone on bone on both hips. So, what did he say to me? Well, I was kind of shocked, and he was like, Well, you know, you can have a hip replacement if you want one, kind of like it's an option, but that's not going to cure the bursitis. So at this point, I'm surprised because there's clearly a problem, but he says it's not necessary to treat it to deal with the hip. And so here I'm kind of losing faith in like, why am I here? And I remember this was the second or third visit. Basically, he's like, You're cool. I can't do, you know, we can't do anything. You just kind of trundle along, it'll be up. And I remember leaving his office, barely being able to walk to the elevator on the same floor, just to tear saying, This is bullshit. Excuse me. You know, I and I at that point I just kind of lost faith that I didn't know what to do. I just kept doing what I was doing. I really feel like the reason we have pain is to alert us to problems and dangers. And when we're not able, do not feel comfortable or able to articulate the pain that we're in, or we don't feel that people are responding to us, it's very disabling. It's more than uh disheartening, it it makes you question your own experience, and so I know that that was the experience after the doctor identified bursitis. And initially I thought, oh yeah, my dad had bursitis, he never had surgery, but and he lived a long time. But uh, you know, I just remember thinking, oh, that's familiar. Yeah, I've heard of that, and that makes sense, but I didn't understand the way uh the pain he was parsing pain out to attach it in a way to something that was uncurable, as though the pain had no reason to be there. The pain was telling me my hips were nothing, um, and his unwillingness to go there or see that that was a viable solution. And I'm not sure why that was. Um, it can be many more reasons beyond me as an individual. I the medical establishment is complicated.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

And it demonstrates that even in our generation as women, we can be prey to what our mother's generation went to through, where we we leave that doctor I'm guessing was a male, perhaps. And um uh I don't I don't know what what anything about him, but that they're the authority, they're the authority. And so one thing we've really learned as aging women is that we are the the masters of our own body, we're in charge of it. We listen to our bodies, and our bodies tell us what we need, and we go out and get those needs met. And if the doctor says something otherwise, we figure out a way around it. And I'm happy to to say that Gina's got new hips, I've got new knees, and um, I think I'll talk about that in another episode on on Health Span and and how we want to stay healthy and active and do the things that we want to do throughout our lives. So um I think we'll leave it there for today. This has been really good. I want to thank Regina for being here as our very first guest. And I want to ask people to like and subscribe. If you're a regular listener and you have uh health stories that you want to share, like Regina, get in touch with me and we'll we'll talk about it and and see what what we can do. So until next time, we are staying alive.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

Thank you, Margaret.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

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