And how much power and leverage do you honestly feel like you have when you’re filling in little circles on a ballot sheet that only offer limited pre-determined options?
The only way to have power and leverage in the political system is to be a politician.
That time in the year 2000 I had gotten extremely ill and I had never felt such peculiar horrific illness in my life, it was like a flu but worse and weirder and I felt like I was going to die because I couldn’t eat I couldn’t stand up, (I’m normally an extremely healthy active person), this went on for a couple weeks and I lived alone which made it impossible to see a doctor because I couldn’t drive myself in that condition,
but thankfully I had a spiritually intuitive friend who had a feeling she should call me and thankfully she did and she arranged for one of her friends to drive me to the hospital.
So I saw my primary care physician and he was very dismissive of me. When he came into the room he saw me laying on the crackly paper bed and he insultingly thought I was faking sick and trying to get out of work, and told me to sit up. He mockingly said “oh you’re not feeeeling well?” He troubled himself to run a throat culture on me then sent me home. I was not feeling well enough to go back home and die alone.
The next day my same friend arranged to come pick me up and take me to the emergency room where they admitted me into the hospital.
I was hospitalized for 2 weeks apparently I had cytomegalovirus, and they ran all kinds of tests on me including general anesthesia for throat probe down to my intestines, an eye exam for some reason, but mostly those two weeks were a complete blur to me, I mostly slept all the time.
The husband and son of my friend came to pick me up from the hospital when it was all over, and I was recuperating at home for another week before returning to work, when I got a phone call from my original primary care physician and he said “You know what, your throat culture came back looking a little unusual.”
I’m like
“No shit! I was just hospitalized nearly dead for 2 weeks. Now you’re calling me a month later telling me my throat culture was slightly abnormal? If I’d waited here all that time for your phone call, I wouldn’t have answered the phone because I would’ve been dead. Thanks for nothing.”
I didn’t actually say all those things to them, we don’t think of how to respond to such things until years later.
That time in 2006 I had a really good OBGYN that was seeing me through from the beginning of my pregnancy all the way to my childbirth, but somewhere along the way at one of my visits he said there was a visiting doctor on the floor who wanted to examine me and asked for my permission and consent and I’m like
sure whatever, why wouldn’t I trust a doctor? If he needs to do something and learn something for his professional credentials, sure, go ahead whatever you need to do. I didn’t say all those words, but that was the gist of the exchange.
Then for some reason my doctor and the nurse chaperone left the room(?!) so it was just that visiting Dr and me in the room and he got creepy wanting to touch my cervix and he looked me in the eye while he did it and it was just a creepy vibe, and I could tell he was being a perv about it.
Extremely unprofessional.
and it’s not like I was even sexy. A wild jungle of pubic hairs, fat, there was nothing sexy about me, he was just a sick twisted doctor
and I wonder whatever became of him. I never saw him before or since and I never got around to reporting the incident because it took a while for my brain to comprehend that what he did was not appropriate, and I had a million other things going on in my life, this was just a weird thing that happened that got lost in the jumble of all the other life events.
It happened at Trinity Health Hospital in Minot North Dakota.
That time in 2004 I requested a specific kind of birth control from my doctor because I had just had a baby with the most horrific postpartum depression you could ever imagine, and I never wanted to go through that ever again.
In retrospect it’s clear that the doctor was uncomfortable with the mere thought of inserting an IUD, he had probably never done it before, and he did not want to do it. He didn’t say that, but the discomfort on his face was obvious, and he talked me up about some sort of a birth control patch like a sticker that I wear on my arm.
I did not want a sticker on my arm. I wanted an IUD.
But he sent me away with the arm sticker and I didn’t want it so I didn’t put it on. I felt hopeless and unheard and invalidated and that nothing I wanted mattered.
Two years later my husband got me pregnant again 😭
Postpartum depression is absolutely hell and I wouldn’t wish this psychological trauma on Hitler himself.
17 years later the good news is my second child turned out to be the most angelic cute brilliant hilarious precious gift you could ever imagine.