Their Medical Opinion Is Not Abs-olute
Hospital, Non-Dialogue, USA | Healthy | December 8, 2017
When I was in grad school I was hit by a car while walking home one night. At the time it appeared all I suffered was road rash and bruises and I was sent home from the ER pretty quickly, but over the next several months internal symptoms started manifesting, culminating in me being unable to eat or drink anything without suffering severe abdominal pain.
I’m home with my parents for the summer when it gets so bad they call me an ambulance and accompany me to the ER. Before anyone can tell the first person who sees me not to do so, they’ve put morphine in my IV, which I do NOT get along with, so when the doctor arrives to check me out I’m being terribly sick while my poor mother holds the bucket. The doctor takes one look at me (female, age 22) and starts lecturing me about the evils of binge drinking and really, if I’m going to drink enough beer to make me sick I deserve the consequences. By the time I could lift my head enough to see what was going on, two nurses and an orderly were holding back my dad from wreaking grave bodily injury on this idiot. (As it happens, never before or since have I ever had enough to drink that it made me sick.)
Turned out the impact trauma had caused intestinal adhesions which needed to be surgically cut loose so peristalsis would function normally again. No thanks to that idiot doc, or the four after him — the first doctor who actually listened to me and who performed the surgery that fixed everything was, not coincidentally, the only female doctor I saw through the whole ordeal. I have not seen a male doctor since!
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