r/comics • u/TheNectarineDiaries • Jun 19 '26

OC Why didn't you say so?

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Best medical advice I ever got was to bring a man to your appointments

47.3k Upvotes

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951

u/the-effects-of-Dust Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

I went to the emergency room after experiencing abdominal pain in my lower right quadrant for a full 24 hours. I remember thinking “I without a shadow of a doubt know this is appendicitis.” (Surprisingly it didn’t hurt as much as I thought but I also have endometriosis so like — pain tolerance is weird for me) ANYWAY
Triage nurse told me it couldn’t be appendicitis because I didn’t have a fever. I had to demand a ct scan or whatever they used to diagnose that and had to cry and talk to a doctor before they would.

Anyway my appendix had not exploded yet but had split open and was leaking pus into my abdominal cavity and if they sent me home I would have likely died 😇 (so said my surgeon after I came to the next morning).

Edit: I forgot to add my favorite part! I had pretty good health insurance at the time (like, US standards…so…) but I went to a hospital out of network so I was initially billed $28,000 for my surgery! My surgeon had to argue the insurance company down because “it was literally a life or death emergency” so they brought it down to $3,000. Which I still haven’t paid. Because poverty. 😇

541

u/Lycaon-Ur Jun 19 '26

I was (casually) dating a girl who was in your situation but who was told it was IBS and was sent home. She left behind 2 kids.

359

u/Chrispeefeart Jun 19 '26

I wonder how many children have been orphaned because doctors wouldn't take women seriously

217

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

86

u/SmoothTurtle872 Jun 19 '26

All of my female friends have complained about this, like it's clearly a massive problem.

42

u/Solynox Jun 19 '26

Genuinely wtf is being taught in medical school for physicians to consistently downplay womens symptoms?

57

u/Goodgoditsgrowing Jun 20 '26

I mean until recently they didn’t even have to test drugs in women to get fda clearance, because women’s pesky hormones were seen as complicating the data set. That’s how birth control ended up causing heart attacks. And the same concept is why women’s heart attacks are dismissed as atypical - because they aren’t “normal” like a man’s heart attack with its “normal” symptoms….. women are an obstacle to be excised in medicine, an anomaly or outlier to ignore, terribly weird and always abnormal.

27

u/Born-West-6151 Jun 19 '26

Centuries/millennia of bias probably

7

u/FrostyCat13 Jun 20 '26

As someone else said, until very recently, medical research was done exclusively on males since it was "easier since it's the same without pesky hormones". There's also still some teachers and/or textbooks which states women have a higher tolerance to pain yet at the same time also say women are more likely to complain over nothing and there's also racism in there since there's a lot of "black people are more resistant to pain" and other unproven bullshit.

It's a lot of old misogyny and racism that's been baked into the medical field for centuries and it's hard to get rid of.

34

u/MichTheFish Jun 20 '26

As someone chronically ill who transitioned from being read as a woman to being read as a man, I can personally vouch that I'm taken much more seriously by urgent care and er docs now than I did when I was a female teenager and young adult.

21

u/peachesfordinner BumBum Ouchie Jun 20 '26

I've heard this from a lot of ftm. Truly a good data set

16

u/TinyChaco Jun 20 '26

I'm also ftm. This tracks.

6

u/FrostyCat13 Jun 20 '26

And I'm MTF and I can attest to the opposite, went from being taken seriously by doctors to easily being dismissed.

3

u/Man-ah-tee13 Jun 20 '26

I'm a pancreatic patient, have been for over a decade. Had a flare up. Went to the ER like I'm supposed to, and was told by a doctor that "my mother has pancreatic flare ups and she just treats them at home with bowel rest and meds." Got sent home. The next day I'm back and hospitalized for 8 days. Some of these "doctors" are a freaking joke.

30

u/AstuteStoat Jun 20 '26

so determined to make women into mothers, but not determined enough to let kids keep the mothers.

11

u/peachesfordinner BumBum Ouchie Jun 20 '26

This is both enraging and depressing at the same time. Well said

11

u/Dante_C Jun 19 '26

Too many

3

u/FantasticalRose Jun 20 '26

I've never gone to an appointment alone for years now

72

u/Tomytom99 Jun 20 '26

I went on a date with a girl who went in after being bit by a cat that frequented the dumpster at her work. She said it was acting erratically and whatnot. You know, the works, just not visibly foaming at the mouth. They give her basic antibiotics and send her on her way.

Later that night a guy got bit by the same cat at the same location, and they listened to him when he suggested rabies. Turns out that's what it was.

She says the CDC was frantically calling her after that dude's visit telling her "get to a hospital immediately, every hospital near you is expecting you and has shots ready. Pick one, go now."

She was extremely lucky in that apparently it was a slower moving strain.

31

u/veshume Jun 20 '26

What the hell... I'm very well aware of medical sexism but I cannot comprehend how they didn't give her rabies shots. I'm not calling bullshit on you, I just can't imagine a doctor would hear anyone saying they were bitten by a feral animal and not immediately become concerned about rabies. She is so incredibly lucky to survive this!

2

u/FrostyCat13 Jun 20 '26

Because there's a lot of "women are hysterical" in the medical field leading to people acting like a woman saying it has to be something dangerous being taken as an exaggeration while men are often seen as only seeking help when absolutely needed, so if a man is at the hospital, it has to be something serious...

Some teachers in the medical field still teach these sort of things today...

1

u/veshume Jun 21 '26

Thanks, like I said, I'm very well aware of medical sexism, and I understand how it works and why. It's mere existence (and its manifestations), though, is baffling sometimes, because it's so nonsensical.

1

u/saltedsnail2 Jun 21 '26

Antibiotics for a feral animal bite is completely insane. That doctor needs to get bit or quit the profession.

30

u/cyanraichu Jun 19 '26

Holy shit :(

20

u/stofiski-san Jun 20 '26

Not the point, by any means, but I hope that hospital and staff was sued so thuroughly that those kids won't need to worry about money ever again, and that that doctor never practiced medicine ever again. Hell, that should be a manslaughter charge

6

u/Lycaon-Ur Jun 20 '26

Not to my knowledge. The facility did close a while later and while another one opened at the same time, not everyone got their jobs at the new location

7

u/iggy14750 Jun 20 '26

Goddamn. I had appendicitis years ago. Doc just pushed on my lower right (over the appendix), I said ow; he immediately diagnosed me. Took it out before it ever tore or anything.

Why the fuck didn't they just check?

5

u/Lycaon-Ur Jun 20 '26

No idea. It was an IHS facility in a rural town so maybe resources, maybe lazy ass doctors, maybe just no fucks given.

1

u/taolbi Jun 20 '26

Well I hope she found a baby sitter!