#I got back from a loooong walk with friends and I'm exhausted

[illmoraineakoi]

Fun Fact: A few years ago, I went to the ER with the worst stomach pain I ever had. I legitimately thought my appendix had burst, because it was in that general area and I still had mine.

It was a fucking nightmare.

[Under a Read More bc this got loooong. Also, Trigger Warning: Graphic Image]

They refused to do anything for me until I proved I wasn't pregnant via a urine sample.

I was so nauseous that I literally couldn't keep water down, and I hadn't drank anything for the entire day because of that (because I am American and had resisted even going to the hospital until the pain had reached that 'I think I might literally be dying' point.) So there's like four nurses that kept badgering me to drink the water, stop vomiting, tell us when you last bled from your vagina, who's your sexual partner, etc.

Some important facts about me: I have never once had sex with a living man; the only sexytime friends I have are the ones made from rubber. I have a VERY irregular menstrual cycle, to the point where I once only had four periods in an entire year (I heavily suspect I have PCOS.) And I am a very fat woman with crippling social anxiety.

Those immutable facts didn't matter apparently.

Because despite being a 25 year old adult, the nurses apparently decided that I needed to be chided to about how "A lot of young girls don't want to tell us this information because they don't want to get in trouble."

...So that was fun, being assumed to be a total liar about my sexual history :)

And also very patronizing, to be lumped in with 'young girls'. Maybe those same 'young girls' also don't want to tell you shit because you're also being super patronizing and righteously to them too, did you ever think about that?

The entire visit was like that. It felt like getting teeth pulled, and trying to pull teeth in return.

"We can't give you any pain meds until we're sure you're not pregnant." "Unless I'm the next Vi grin Mary, I can guarantee you I Am Not. I feel like my stomach is going through a chipper shredder. May I at least have a low does of something?" ":) No. Wait here for another half hour without seeing one of us. There's a tiny child complaining of a tummy ache three doors down."

[That child walked out of there in five minutes. He'd just had really bad gas. I get the need to prioritize people based on the severity of what was/might be wrong with them, but that still kinda pissed me off. Especially because it still hadn't be explicitly ruled out that one of my internal organs hadn't exploded.]

Shocker, how the nurses got a little grumbly when my test came back completely negative, because OF COURSE IT DID, I LITERALLY TOLD YOU THAT MY VAGINA HAS NEVER SEEN A REAL DICK IN HER ENTIRE EXISTENCE.

Reminder that I was 25-26 when this was happening. NOT a teenager, and not even an age where I could be mistaken for being younger than I actually was. I was an adult woman, and I looked like an adult woman. Who also gave her date of birth on the paperwork they made her fill out.

Who they had refused to not perform a pregnancy test on despite my repeated refusal and instance that such a test was unnecessary.

[I double-checked this with the surgeon who actually took care of the problem, afterwards. I asked specifically if the pregnancy test was used to look for other problems or help determine a suspected diagnosis. They sometimes could, she said, but not for me. Not for any of the things that could have been wrong with me outside of pregnancy-related things. The test was 100% just to determine if i was knocked up, and thus completely useless. A waste of everyone's time.]

Those nurses straight up told me if I refused to give them a urine sample to test, there was nothing they could do for me and they would have to ask me to leave. I HAD to comply.

At that point, i was in so much pain (literally crying) and so mentally exhausted that I just gave up and did what they wanted. And, also, by that point, the fluids they'd been pumping into me had actually gathered enough for me to be able to give them my piss.

That was the first instance of this HOSPITAL refusing to listen to me.

The second was when they found out what was wrong, and sent me home with three days worth of pain meds to last until my primary OBGYN handled the problem.

Important note: I did not have an OBGYN. I had to figure out who in my area accepted my insurance and then call around asking if they were open to new patients.

Or, I would have had to call around, if there wasn't exactly one (1) Lady Part Doctor within 100 miles of my location that took my insurance. Who had not been open to accepting new patients.

I begged. I literally fucking begged this office.

Just this once, can one of your doctors figure out what's wrong with me and help me. I'll fucking pay out of pocket if you want me to, I'll pay double, I'll do anything, just please give me access to someone who can tell me what the fuck is going on and make the pain stop.

Because oh yeah, the hospital hadn't done that.

They didn't tell me what was wrong with me. They just said "You have gynecological issues that we can't treat. Contact your OBGYN and go to them. Bye."

There was zero mention of the 13 inch wide Ovarian cyst that these motherfuckers found on the ultrasound they did. A hugeass cyst that could pop at any point and was literally strangling my ovary to death. The pain? Yeah, that's why; my ovary was twisted so tight that blood couldn't get to it and it was DYING. That pain was my right ovary's death screams.

It took a week to get into the OBGYN office. [My ovary was unsalvageable by that point. Any longer, and it would have started to rot and give me sepsis.]

Luckily, the universe decided that I had suffered enough misfortune during this horrible situation, and threw me a miracle that I am still grateful for to this day: the main OBGYN doctor of the office I begged had agreed to see me.

Because apparently she had figured out what was likely wrong just from those ten minutes of talking to me on the phone, and had become concerned enough to want more information.

Also apparently, she was APPALLED that the hospital had ever let me walk out it's doors, because she very much considered this to be a huge emergency requiring surgery ASAP.

The problem being this fucking thing:

[Warning: Graphic]

Yeah, that was inside of me.

That is the Dermoid Cyst they pulled out of me. That red tubey thing on the right of the second pic? That WAS my ovary.

What had happened was that, that day, I had moved just wrong enough for it to then shift inside me and twist my ovary at the falopian tube. This thing was likely growing inside of me for most of my life, which is normal for dermoid cysts. They're just normally found before they're so big and also normally don't cause problems.

I forget the exact measurements they took of it, but I think it was even larger than they thought it was. I just default to 13 inches because that's how big she originally told it might be from the ultrasound imagining, and that number kinda fried my brain.

[It was noncancerous. Just full of normal Dermoid Cyst stuff, like hair, fat, puss, etc.]

I had that inside of me. For a full week. While it had twisted my ovary and strangled it to death.

AND THE HOSPITAL HAD DETERMINED THAT IT WAS THERE AND SENT. ME. HOME.

The OBGYN doctor who agreed to see me had been my savior. She was a godsend. Because she wasn't just an OBGYN, she was also a surgeon. She MADE room in her schedule to do surgery on me the very next day.

That was how concerned she was about this thing rupturing inside of me and KILLING ME.

BECAUSE YEAH, THAT WAS THE FIRE THAT I WAS APPARENTLY PLAYING WITH! THE DANGER THAT I HAD NO IDEA ABOUT. FUN!

[And she was such a kind person. She apologized no less than ten times for not being able to keep the incision smaller, because she knew it would scar. She had to go around my belly button just to fit this stupid thing out of me. I didn't care about that. A scar is a scar, they happen. The fact that she helped me to the degree she did when she literally didn't have to was all that mattered to me. She was the one who helped me through everything about this situation, and I will never forget her kindness. I am still thankful to her, even now.]

But you wanna know the kicker? The part that I still rage about, and thing that made me refuse to ever go back to that hospital even if i was literally dying?

She was a surgeon who partially worked at that same exact hospital.

And she had been there, that very night I had come in.

And she told me, "if someone had told me about this then, I would have come help you. I would have taken you on as a patient right then and there and squeezed you in sooner. Maybe not that night, specifically, but definitely the next day. There is no excuse for them to have sent you home like they did. They should have brought this case to my attention. Handling these types of surgeries and c-sections are all I do at this hospital. I don't know why ER hadn't let me know."

The double kicker? I had asked if there was anyone there who could help me at the time. And the hospital said no.

Had the ER staff contacted her and had I had the surgery a full week earlier, I would still have my right ovary. She could have saved it, it wouldn't have been too late.

The ability to have kids isn't important to me. I don't want to have babies, I don't like babies. The loss of one of my ovaries isn't a big deal to me.

But I am horrified to think how emotionally devastating that this situation could have been for someone who DID consider the ability to have children important.

And I just find it so very ironic, that the hospital that was so concerned about determining if I was up the duff to the point of causing me agony for hours is the same exact hospital that permanently affected my fertility.

Funny, that.

I did not feel like I was treated, medically, at that ER. I still don't, to this day. I didn't feel like a human person that was worth their time or sympathy, because no one there afforded me even the barest scraps of either.

They didn't listen to me. They didn't try to work with me to determine a plan of action. They didn't even tell me what was wrong with me. There was ZERO communication.

I don't know how the ER medical field works, I don't know if this is normal, if I'm just complaining out my ass and all the ER nurses and docs are currently rolling their eyes at me, I have no idea if I seem entitled or not. I thought I had behaved pretty reasonably and politely. I thought that my expectations of how I would be handled wasn't outrageous or illogical. Maybe I'm missing some context and the nuances of how the Emergency Room functions. This is the only time I've ever been there.

But if the above is normal...Fam, this ain't it. This isn't how you treat people. This shouldn't be how you treat people.

It never felt like I was being helped. Just like I was a problem and shouldn't be there. Like the only parts of me they saw were my vagina and uterus.

It's only coincidence that what was wrong with me was actually a problem with my female parts. Had it been a popped appendix like I thought it had been, how much longer would it have taken them to get there? Until I needed to be hospitalized for sepsis?

Or would they have contributed that to a problem with my vagina too?

Medically speaking, informed consent does not just apply to things you want done to you or for you, it also applies to things that you don't want done to you or things you don't want withheld from you.

I don't think a lot of people realize that, and I don't think a lot of medical professionals want to acknowledge that, because it means they would have to reevaluate the ethics of denying treatment to patients. Also they would have to reckon with their patients' agency and right to self-determination. Both of those things really freak some medpros out.