I think that is how I describe it. Life has stopped on a dime until I get to the bottom of this medical issue (see previous diary). The magical thinking has hit me hard this weekend. I don't want to sing, or clean, or paint, or laugh too loudly. Any of those things could make bad things happen.
Being fearful is such a weird place to be, inside of one's head.
I have bought more clothing this last week than in a long time. Sad truth: If I show up in my tee-shirt and jeans, even though I am a full figured, voluptuous mature woman (for now), medical personnel will treat me like a child immediately.
As one close friend put it, I have to put on "grown up" clothes if I expect even a chance of being treated like an adult woman. And sometimes, the difference in treatment is negligible.
Anyone else find this annoying? That we women are constantly criticized for being "vain" because we are supposedly always primping, but if we don't all look like GlamAzons when we go to the doctor, they might just let us suffer. End result: I wear more makeup when I am sick than I would at any other time. I have to be able to flirt with the medical personnel and pout, otherwise I might not get the care I need.
I am considering going to Frederick's of Hollywood to get some big push up bras and tassels. Maybe if I dress like a stripper I will get even better care. I know you are wondering why I wouldn't go to Victoria's Secret--well they only make stuff for skinny women. So if you got a triple D- and only a 26 inch chest barrel--then you are good to go. If you are built like a line backer with those big boobs--then hang it up sister, they got nothing for your kind.
But still, you are expected to keep up appearances. I thought perhaps when I am done losing the weight, after I invest thousands into plastic surgery and lipo, that I could take up pole dancing. That way, at future office visits, I could entertain the staff in a way that might inspire them to look for less extreme measures. (snark)
Today when I go for results, I will be wearing heels. Even though there is ice everywhere, these torture devices that the fashion world pretends are "shoes" will be strapped onto my enormous feet. I will be pushing 6 ft tall at this point. That's the positive I get out of this. I have the height to match my weight at this point. I can stand up and be challenging or even intimidating if I need to.
If I am lucky, my next doctor will have a foot fetish for big female feet. Hey--anything to generate sympathy and a sense of emotional connection right? I feel like I need to bone up on how to deal with serial killers. Like that scene in Silence of the Lambs when Senator Martin is pleading for her daughter on the television. Agent Starling and a colleague are watching and comment that it's smart to use the victim's name as much as possible, and to humanize her.
I find myself negotiating a narrow cliff between humanizing myself to a male dominated medical field while trying to hang on to my personal power. Women and Power are not always easily accepted simultaneously.
Meanwhile silence. I sometimes watch television, in between hours spent researching the internet on this topic. I channel surf a lot. Anything that mentions dead wives or dead mothers gets a pass. You would be surprised how many movies have that as a plot or sub-plot. I know intellectually that it's an extension of our faerie tale culture. It's a common motif--dead parents, etc., but right now, it's still creepy. Anything to avoid feeding those dark fantasies.
I am sorry, but Cancer or Castration?
Not cool.
I have read many personal anecdotes about women who said they did not consent to a total hystererctomy, but ended up with one anyhow. And when I mentioned it to my spouse he wondered how that could happen, legally. I wondered too.
Just search "unnecessary hysterectomy" and see what pops up.
Apparently many women report being on the gurney on the way to "exploratory surgery" and are given a consent form that basically says if the surgeon finds anything that might be cancer, it's okay to remove it." These women also report being partially sedated when this happens. I have read more than a few tearful posts about women suing the doctors when they learn that they did not indeed have cancer after the fact. This is some real Humpty Dumpty shit here, once it's done, that's it.
That reminds me of a far side cartoon from way back. A dog is in the human's car talking to the cat. And it's smiling and bragging, "I'm going to the vet to get tutored."
I am not liking that shit at all.
I don't even like the name of the procedure. It sounds like the doctor's are doing us a favor by removing our hysteria. But no, it's just straight up castration.
What is it that we have against women's reproductive organs? What is it that we have against whole women or leaving them whole or fighting for their wholeness? When Lance Armstrong got testicular cancer, they didn't castrate his ass, they removed one testicle because it was absolutely necessary. Not likely--not suspicious, not a maybe, but absolutely necessary. So what's up with this? Why go to all the trouble of protecting a man's testicles, and then turn around and castrate women even without being sure?
AND Why use these shady practices to get it done? I feel like there are a combination of factors at work here, the more I read.
1. Money Saving. Lets face it with our current Tea Bagger mentality that is so prevalent in medicine, saving money while spending money is a very big deal. Hysterectomies, like C-sections make hospitals a lot of cash. They are easier to do, than actual exploratory surgery. Cheaper than a lot of check ups, and scans. And apparently more popular than removal of just fibroids, or cystectomies on ovaries, or ablation for endometriosis. So a hysterectomy is a one stop shopping deal, where you can make several thousand for the hospital etc., while pretending to save your insurance company money in the long run, by removing those pesky organs that make those companies charge women extra for the pre-existing condition of being a woman in the first place.
Anyone remember this ad campaign?
Oh but we are pre-existing conditions. If only you would let the medical community remove the cause of that status.
2. America hates women. I know some will say that the previous statement is over the top, but I disagree. We don't support women in childbirth, we don't offer them comprehensive education about any aspect of their reproductive lives, starting with ignorance only training and ending with this sort of mess here. We cut them open and gut them whenever possible, spaying them like stray cats when we aren't scaring them about the birth process by treating pregnancy and birth like a disease. We have had to fight a huge battle over breast feeding. We still don't get equal pay, and the military (need I say more)? We cannot even sit on boards in our legislature that decide our access to birth control. Part of the gub'mint shutdown was over women's access to contraception.
3. America hates aging women more. The older you are, the less beautiful you are, the less useful you are as either a breeder or a sex toy. Seriously, the attitudes I see that are so prevalent about women now, especially in the medical field make me pray for the return of those angry Feminists I knew back in the 80s and 90s. We need you womyn! Put on your suits, raise your fists and make a scene! I need you! I need some back-up! Aging women are invisible. That's why no one notices when people abuse them. And they suffer silently for now. I suspect that the next couple of generations will be more vocal hopefully.
4. CYA: a friend stated that CYA is probably a big piece of this. If they cut everything out, then I cannot come back and sue them for cancer. Only thing is--a) Endo, and PCOS etc., like breast feeding are medical "black boxes". We know that HPV causes cervical cancer, so we can do things to sort of prevent that and watch out for it. But with these others, the doctors just sort of stick their thumbs in their asses and mutter "duh". And I don't think they care to know. You can pick up the Diary of Queen Elizabeth I and read about what sounds like Endomitriosis --that's how many hundreds of years ago? So rather than get to the bottom of these issues which are probably epi-genetic in origin and therefore a combination of genes and environment, rather than spend the billions needed to reign in the chemical industry, it's just easier to spay women whose bodies eventually have an adverse event due to chronic exposure to BPA and phtalates, pesticides, and xenoestrogens. CYA is also the major factor behind our C-section epidemic and the fight over VBAC or vaginal birth after C-section. Blame it on the economic misogyny of the insurance companies. Women are complicated and complication= expensive, and we can't tolerate that.
Like I said, I have been doing lots of reading.
Lady's Home Journal: Harmful Hysterectomies: What your doctor's not telling you by L. Laurence.
One woman who had a total hysterectomy meaning they removed the ovaries as well stated: "At her six week post-op visit, Urquhart asked, "what happened to me?" She says the doctor laughed and replied, "It's menopause. You'd have been like this in a year anyway."
Wow. What an insensitive asshole. But you know when I balked at such a suggestion, my doctor had a similar attitude and retort. It was precious.
First of all no she wouldn't. If she had remained intact, she would have had her ovaries, and they keep producing hormones well after menopause which would have mitigated the symptoms of "The Change".
She reports that it destroyed her sex life. You say well it's not like she's dead. Well for some of us, sex is a big deal, and it would be emotionally devastating, and it can ruin marriages because this practice of spaying, of castrating women, That's the big "THE CHANGE," and no one is talking about it. But I am not surprised, because our culture was too embarrassed to say the word Vagina in public or talk about Menopause by name, so it figures we would hide female castration like yet another dirty little female secret.
See a woman say Vagina in a state legisature session. Oohh VAGINA!
The Curse, The Change, Sausage Wallet, Oven, Squeeze Box--I am all for creative linguistics but not when that is used to promote embarrassment and shame over being alive and a woman or a female. And I am more than a baby-incubator. I feel like I have to reiterate that statement in every stage of my life. Make up my mind already--When I am not being legislated into a constant state of pre-pregnancy I am having to fight forced sterilization? And informed consent is more than just about abortion people! You cannot consent if you are not provided with adequate data, and FYI--scary spin is not data.
"After 40--when preserving childbearing is no longer the goal--taking out the uterus, cervix, and ovaries prevents gynecological cancers. Preventing cancer is a noble goal, but the fact is, hysterectomy's not the only solution out there now. And we also need to start thinking about lifetime survival rates and quality-of-life issues such as sexual functioning."
Sadly, the guy that made that statement is in California and not in Oklahoma.
And in my case--a possible diseased ovary:
"Whatever your age, don't agree to lose your healthy ovaries without discussing your risk of ovarian cancer--a rare but dangerous disease (there are more than 22,000 new cases a year compared with more than 178,000 cases of breast cancer)" We don't spend a lot of time assuring women that their chances of having ovarian cancer are astronomically small," says Dr Levy. "It's easier to suck a woman into surgery she doesn't need by making her afraid she's got something bad."
THANK YOU DR LEVY! Well Said!
That last line:
"It's easier to suck a woman into surgery she doesn't need by making her afraid she's got something bad."
That's what reminds me of the birth industry. Yep, it's easier to scare a person shitless, but --and I cannot stress this enough:
It's unethical.
It's coercive.
It's fraudulent in many cases.
And it needs to stop right now.
The C-word is scary all by itself. I don't need any help being scared. But because the medical profession has proven to be so eager to jump the gun and the scapel, I feel the need to be more alert, more questioning, even more challenging. Because at this point, due to the present innate hostility expressed towards women in the medical field, I cannot be entirely sure if their recommendations are or will be based on facts or bias masquerading belief, dressed up with half truths, or worse, a desire to save money at the expense of my quality of life.
A uterus is not a pre-existing condition.
Ovaries are not a pre-existing condition.
And the possibility is not the same as an absolute. I am critical of an industry that castrates women over the possibility of reproductive cancers, when they have the tools and the knowledge to find out for sure before taking such extreme action. And I am very critical of the flippant attitudes that accompany this widespread abuse of women's body and women's health.
These are necessary organs and removing them for no good reason is simply castration.
And finally, this is what comes of allowing religious extremists and their pet politicians, the ability to divide women over abortion. It makes us all vulnerable to medical abuses at any stage in our lives. If you can tell a woman she has to be pregnant or trick her into remaining pregnant, then it's okay to make a woman or trick a woman into being castrated.
This is all about bodily integrity and medical ethics.
We Breed Animals and We Castrate Animals--get the picture?
Tue Dec 24, 2013 at 9:57 AM PT: Castration is such a horrible thing. I saw this today in the news:
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
A man that broke codes was convicted of homosexuality, and they castrated him. This is how we thank people. We punish them for being different.
"Turing's electromechanical machine, a forerunner of modern computers, unravelled the code used by German U-boats in the Atlantic. His work at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime codebreaking centre, was credited with shortening the war. However, he was stripped of his job and chemically castrated with injections of female hormones after being convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for having sex with a man. Homosexual sex was illegal in Britain until 1967. Turing killed himself in 1954, aged 41, with cyanide."
I know that what I speak of hasn't happened to me and hopefully will not. But I saw this and it reminds me that castration is a serious medical operation to inflict on any one for any reason at all. This story though, this is a travesty of justice.
Tue Dec 24, 2013 at 12:56 PM PT: More "Women's Health Issues" as a Black-Box : Check out the chemical nastiness in feminine care products:
http://www.alternet.org/...
“I think the question of how toxic [feminine care products] might be is one of those things that is not talked about because there is a such a mystique around the vagina,” says Ogonnaya Dotson-Newman, Director of Environmental Health at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and a WVE board member. “It’s highly taboo and something that’s not supposed to be discussed in polite company.”
Yea, we see that a lot these days. We live in the "modern age" but, still no flying cars, and no discussion about the Vagina or any other female specific body part or health issue.