leatherleaves:

thecringeandwincefactory:

violetohara:

xmagnet-o:

dandridgegirl:

daughter-of-scheherazade:

So I recently got surgery two weeks ago and on the day of the surgery, they had me waiting in a cold room in just a gown because they had to do a pregnancy test. I had just gotten off my period literally two days ago and unless I was miraculously the next Virgin Mary, I’m 100% not pregnant. The nurse barely looks up from her charts to acknowledges this before insisting that I had to take another test. If I didn’t take another one, they would immediately cancel my surgery. It was hospital policy.

I’ve had this condition all my life but its gotten completely unbearable the past few years and I’ve been actively going to the doctors the last two years trying different methods to allievate my pain and this surgery was my last chance at any type of pain free life. It took 6 months to schedule and if I had to wait another second, I was going kill somebody. Safe to say I was a little pissed. I sat in that freezing room, irritated with an IV needle sticking in my hand, waiting on the nurse to find records of my pee test that I did less than a two week ago at their request. She couldn’t find the test results. She handed me an empty container with a cheery smile and an obnoxious prep talk that I did not ask for and told me to fill it.

One of the preparatory requirements they gave me was that the night before the surgery I couldn’t consume any foods or liquid (water especially). So I couldn’t pee. I asked for some water and she reluctantly gave me a cup with two sip fulls.

My surgery was scheduled for 9 A.M, they told me to come in at 7:30 A.M. It was already 11:41 A.M. when I had to retake the test and I didn’t go in until almost 1 P.M. The fact that I had to go through that extra hoop and have the threat of my surgery being cancelled hung over me like a noose just because of a pregnancy test is beyond aggravating. People love perpetually valuing the potential of a possible fetus over the lives of already living women. We always seem to come second no matter what.

That’s sounds extremely stressful. I’m sorry you had to go through that on top of everything else. We aren’t effing incubators!

This is so common amongst girls and women dealing with medical care

[Medical/Miscarriage TW] Earlier this year I went to the ER on a Monday night with terrible abdominal pain, cramps, throwing up, the whole shebang. They did an ultrasound but couldn’t see anything so they attributed it to a bad stomach bug, gave me IV fluids & anti-nausea meds, and sent me home Tuesday morning.

They didn’t want to do a CT scan, you see, because ‘We don’t want to irradiate your uterus unnecessarily.’ Here’s the thing. There was NO way I was pregnant AT ALL because I was literally still suffering & passing the remnants of a fucking spontaneous miscarriage. Not only that, I told them: the miscarriage was a surprise and an accident. I do not want children, had not been trying to have a baby, and had not known I was pregnant until it stopped (it was a weird year).

I was severely dehydrated and on morphine but I do remember telling them ‘I don’t care about my uterus, I’m not using it.’ But because of their concern for any future potential other fetuses, they didn’t do a CT scan. And 20 hours later I got to experience the worst pain of my life, my first CT scan, and my first surgery when my appendix stopped just being infected and decided to go ahead and burst.

I don’t usually add my own $0.02 to posts but misogyny in medicine needs to stop.

Yeah, this happened to me, too, about 17 years ago at University of Chicago Hospital after getting hit by a car. 

Just gonna point out as a woman who works in the medical field that this is actually for YOUR safety, not just the safety of a potential fetus because you’re “an effing incubator”.

There are SO MANY complications that can arise during trauma or surgery when you are unknowingly pregnant. You can easily bleed internally, your body can go into shock trying to save the fetus, your body can go into shock trying to miscarry the fetus, and then we can start counting in different factors such as your wack hormones and blood levels, and then reactions your body will have to certain medications or treatments (such as a miscarriage on an operating table-prime example would be certain anesthetics-because damn what kind of terrible, convoluted, sexist surgeon wants to deal with a patient who’s convulsing, aspirating, internally bleeding, and mid-spontaneous abortion while they’re fixing a broken leg caused by a car wreck? Such assholes, obviously.)

If an ER or OR worker isn’t 100% sure of your pregnancy status and starts going in blindly digging around your abdomen for surgery or hooking you up to medications in an IV that will make you even more sick, or possibly cause you to miscarry a child that you DO want to keep, then that just sets everyone up for more trouble and pain.

I always see posts like this by people who wholeheartedly don’t want children, which is a choice you make and that’s cool, you do you, I honestly dgaf whether you want kids or not. But guess what some people do want children, and if there’s a universal way set in place to potentially save their life AND the life of their child then god damn can’t we just be a little chill and deal with a fucking pregnancy test. I understand it’s an inconvenience to wait, or even life threatening in dire situations (see my previous points tho, that not doing a test could be life threatening to the patient) but this really isn’t a “mysoginist” scandal upon your body. It’s literally just fucking MEDICAL SCIENCE.

Not everything is an attack. Some things set up differently between men and women actually have LOGIC and REASONING and STATISTICAL EVIDENCE proving it to be necessary to protect you because men and women are BIOLOGICALLY DIFFERENT.