Medical Gaslighting: Has It Happened to you?
Mama, here’s my story on medical gaslighting. First let’s define it so we can understand what it is and you might go, oh yeah, that happened to me. Medical Gaslighting: when doctors or healthcare professionals blame a patient’s symptoms on psychological factors or deny the patient’s illness entirely, for example wrongly telling patients that they are not sick.
When I attended my 6 week check up, my body didn’t feel right. My stomach was still quite large and wasn’t seeming to settle. I was still bleeding quite a lot. And as a mama I felt something wasn’t right. In my 6 week appointment, I expressed my concerns to my OB, she responded, “Oh well, you had twins. It’s going to take a while for your stomach to go back to normal.” Almost this feeling of a grandma patting you on your hand. She then told me if I was still bleeding in a couple weeks to call back.
Over two weeks later, I was still bleeding, A LOT. Now I’ve been bleeding for 9 weeks postpartum and not spotting, full on bleeding. It was getting so bad that if I sat down and got up I had to run to the bathroom. I called the doctors office and they scheduled an ultrasound for the following week. At 10 weeks postpartum in March 2020 I went for an ultrasound to make sure everything was ok. The OB called an hour later, and I quote, “There’s so much blood in there we don’t know what’s going on.”
Turned out I had leftover placenta in there. Which made sense. My stomach couldn’t heal and that’s why I still looked 6 months pregnant. Low milk supply was probably due to the leftover placenta. The reason my babies were struggling to gain weight or get quality milk. I physically didn’t feel good by this point. I’d lost so much blood and my body couldn’t heal. It was awful.
Then I was told it was an easy procedure, I was to have a DNC to remove the placenta and it was anesthetic and I’d be home in a couple hours. Keep in mind it’s March 2020. I have to go by myself, there’s no on in the hospital and I have to leave my newborn babies. Once I get into the hospital I am told that I cannot have anesthetic because if I have COVID then it might become airborne and I’d infect everyone in the room, and do I want to do that? So I had to have a SPINAL! For some reason my body metabolizes the spinal very slowly. I had it at 8am and couldn’t leave the hospital until 6pm and this was after forcing my body to move because I didn’t want to be there anymore.
If my doctor had listened to me at my 6 week appointment, I could’ve gone in and been out in 2 hours with anesthesia, my body would’ve started healing, my bleeding would’ve stopped, our babies could’ve thrived, my milk production and quality could’ve improved and instead my OB treated me like a mama who wanted her body back. Dismissing my intuition. Thus having me bleed for 12 weeks postpartum, struggle to breastfeed, have a hard time moving due to my size and feel awful from all the blood loss. This is medical gaslighting.
Mama, I am here to say, fight for yourself. If you feel something is off in your pregnancy or postpartum, trust your intuition. You know your body. Don’t let anyone make you feel you’re wrong. This is medical gaslighting.
