I didn’t have a PTSD episode while awaiting my colonoscopy to annoy my gastroenterologist, but annoyed he was.
He is a busy, important (or shall I say, self-important) man.
The PTSD wasn’t “all in my head.” My heart was racing, and my blood pressure was skyrocketing. My gastroenterologist would have to wait until my thyroid was tested and found to be normal, until the intravenous propranolol was administered and took effect, until my vital signs were stabilized so anaesthesia could be safely used.
This was a great inconvenience to him, and it was my fault. Therefore, he punished me by turning his back on me and not talking to me, like a toddler furious with a parent.
I tried to communicate my distress. I tried to engage him in conversation or at least tempt him to look at me, perhaps say my name, ask about my welfare, or show some kindness.
Nothing worked. Without a word of greeting, of warning, or of explanation, I was drugged and rendered unconscious.
Upon waking afterwards, I felt like an assault victim who blames herself for the assault. I should have foreseen this doctor’s horrific behavior and headed it off, torn the IV out of my arm, run half-naked into the hospital parking lot, flagged down a taxi or a bus.
While it was happening, I was in shock that a medical professional was behaving so inappropriately. My health records list PTSD as one of my conditions. PTSD is an acknowledged and well-documented, if not well-understood, mental health disorder. A person with PTSD cannot control their nervous system during episodes, cannot slow their heart, or stop the nasty sensations and painful flashbacks from filling their mind and disturbing their body. Time and patience are needed. Humanity, humility, and vulnerability are needed.
The gastroenterologist treated me like a nuisance, exactly the way my parents had treated me when confronted with my feelings during my almost terminal childhood cancer.
Here I was, being treated for breast cancer, being screened for colon cancer, with memories of my lymphatic cancer still fresh in my mind despite it taking place 40 years ago, and I was met with coldness and cruelty by one petty man having what my dead grandma would call a conniption fit, because my existence was throwing a wrench into his schedule.
I am still recovering from this incident, among other unfortunate incidents I have endured in health care settings, where doctors rarely take the time or make the effort to see their patients as people, to listen rather than manage, to see emotions as just as important to health as blood and bones and flesh.
Cancer and the threat of cancer are rotten enough without physicians neglecting or abusing you for who you are, for what you have endured, or for what is important to you.
I insist on making my PTSD wounds into wings, into weapons. As Audre Lorde writes, silence does not protect us. I live to have my voice heard. I live to be the change I want to see in the world.
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