Women’s problems ignored by doctors
YOU must have experienced that weird sensation when a story suddenly appears in the news and to you it is not a story at all. In fact, you and your family have lived this so-called news story to the point where it has become embedded in your collective consciousness.
That is how I feel about the supposed revelation that half of all women are being failed by GPs who – where gynaecological complaints are concerned – fail to treat us with dignity or respect and dismiss our perfectly routine symptoms as “all in our heads” or the result of having too much time on our hands or having succumbed to the Change Of Life
A frightening percentage of women are forced to visit their doctors no fewer than 10 times to stand any chance whatsoever of being diagnosed with routine conditions, such as fibroids or endometriosis.
Of course, each time we steel ourselves to book another appointment we feel more embarrassed, more nervous of being branded fantasists or hypochondriacs and more likely to carry on suffering in silence because we can’t face being sent packing yet again with no treatment plan or even acknowledgement that we are ill and suffering.
I confess, I write this with a bitter mixture of sadness and anger because this newly minted story catalogues exactly what happened to my own mother who died 22 years ago aged just 57.
Far from being an overindulged hypochondriac with a propensity to take to NOW they are telling us to eat less salt if we don’t wish to visit the loo in the middle of the night. At this stage, salt is the least of our problems. We wake because we worry. We wake because we haven’t slept properly since breast-feeding on demand 30 years ago. A hot flush nukes our sleep. A cold spate shakes us. We are roused from sleep by indigestion, indignation, excitement, nervous anticipation and the dawn chorus. If we are chaps the prostate acts as a persistent nightly alarm. With this panoply of distraction the effects of a smattering of salt on our fries can surely be safely ignored. her bed, my mother was a stoical trouper who didn’t keep so much as an aspirin in the house.
If she had a headache, and I can barely remember such an occasion, she would go for a walk and “blow the cobwebs away”. She did not do illness. She was far too busy for that.
So when she was beset by charity, we recall his spending frenzies, his flouncing in the film Tantrums And Tiaras and his frantic efforts to achieve some kind of emotional equilibrium.
That is why we are nothing short of thrilled to hear that, at his 70th birthday celebrations, blowing out his candles with the smiling help of his agonising stomach pains, she marched to the GP in search of explanation. Instead of a diagnosis, or referral to a specialist, she was effectively patronised, told not to bother her pretty head over trivialities and dismissed.
When the pains failed to subside she tried again. The response was identical.
HAPPY 70TH BIRTHDAY SIR ELTON JOHN
Rocking from side to side from the sheer force of the pain, she spoke of having to gather all her courage to face, yet again, the GP who wrote off her symptoms as “change of life neurosis”.
Just like the women who responded to the survey by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Women’s Health my mother started to wonder husband David Furnish and beloved sons Zachary, six, and Elijah, four, Sir Elt pronounces himself, “The happiest I have ever been.”
In typical flamboyant style he combined the celebrations with raising money for his Aids Foundation and marking a 50-year partnership with if she was going mad. She wasn’t. She had endometrial cancer. By the time it was discovered it was too late to save her life.
If she had been taken seriously when she first presented the symptoms two years earlier who knows if we might have celebrated a magical Mother’s Day together last Sunday?