Hate Makes Me Unhealthy but I Can't Tell My Doctor

Photo credit: Kendra Berglund

I didn't realize how much of my life was built as a reaction to discrimination. How it was molded around the expectation of hate. Rejection yielded aspects of my personality, altered my hair, denounced my pronunciation, changed the way I ate, how I treated myself, even in how often I went to the doctor's office.

When people tell me that white privilege is a myth or I'm playing the race card, I'm going to start asking them how many of them have avoided the doctor? How many of then have found a lump in their breast and avoided reciving medical attention because they didn't want to have to face the degrading, dehumaninizing, hate-filled interactions that is just calling a doctor's office? How many of them have ignored the signs and symptoms their body illicited, all because they didn't want to have to confront the setting where the patient becomes less than human? Where because of the way you look you are deemed as an animal who cannot function on the basis of logic or reason, where anything that is wrong with you is because you don't take care of yourself because, no one of you do. That attitude is the summation of my trips to the doctor.

When I find something wrong with me that I have been unequaivably persuaded is something I can't handle on my own like, child birth or a growth in my soft tissue, I call to schedule an appointment. This is where the first slap in the face often occurs. Because without seeing me they are so pleasant but once my medical record, with my race, is revealed their tone of voice takes a dramatic turn. I ignore this, assume they are having a bad day but after the first time, the second time, the every time it happens, I come to expect it just like I know this appointment will be rescheduled at least two other times by the doctor's office.

When they call to reschedule they are barely apologetic, just enough to avoid a law suit, they are always annoyed as if I called them at home to tell them the appointment that I have already arranged a babysitter for is no longer available. They assume my health is not an emergency. They assume, I probably don't have a job anyway so they aren't possibly inconveniencing me. This same attitude will mean that I am denied pain medications when I ask for them. This attitude means that every time I describe symptoms they are contested. This attitude means when I explain what previous medical professionals have told me, I am called a liar. The same attitude carries over after I leave the office. The attitude which sharpens when I call to receive test results that are always late in being delivered, or mixed with someone else's or lost, so I have to redo them. I never receive the first call, informing me that my results are in. Every test result from a doctor's office I've ever received is because I spent an afternoon trying to track down the person that I needed to speak to. I am clearly not a priority. Is this how everyone feels at the doctor's office? Like you are a waste of their time? Like you are an inconvenience? Or a manipulative drug seeker?

I've spoken to friends who identify as transgender and they speak about being referred to by their dead name and being misgendered. The less than human attitude being pushed upon them, like it is to black and brown patients. I've read about women who say they felt neglected and ignored when entering healthcare settings. I suppose I'm only writing this because I realize that something as necessary as medical care shouldn't be a place of stigma, suffering and hate.

I understand the history of race medicine, the sterilization that was forced upon Native Americans at hospitals, how modern gynecology was based on the experimentation and the torture of women of color and that homosexuality and being transgender were labeled mental illnesses but it's time that medicine meet us in the era of intersectional feminism, black lives mattering and when "me too," are not words mumbled in shame but words bred from strength and solidarity.