This is going to be a ramble...
J and L went to the beach after all, leaving the house to me for the week. It only took a day for me to miss both of them, but coming home to a quiet clean house without a spouse shouting down the phone has been very, very nice to experience.
Last evening was strange. I had planned to stay out for a while, reading in the park then having some dinner, taking a zTrip home if the bus was too inconvenient. I dropped Uber because of their shitty business practices and treatment towards their female employees (although I still need to delete the credit card from the account, which I really should do because a business that treats employees like crap is bound to get hacked sooner or later...).
I walked down to the Point and sat in the shade to give J a call. As I was talking to J I noticed my hands were shaking, my chest was tight and I felt a bit faint. While it was quite hot and I had not eaten in several hours, I don’t think all my symptoms were physical.
Metafilter has a thread which discusses this comic: https://thenib.com/medicine-s-women-problem.
The comic is about one woman’s FIVE YEAR experience to get doctors to take her sudden weight loss and fatigue to the point of passing out seriously. A sleep therapist finally tested her thyroid function and discovered she had Graves Disease, a condition 7-8 times more common in women then in men.
Reading the thread was difficult, but allows me to finally say out loud what has been bouncing in my head, what I have tried to rationalize away as “they would not have been able to save her anyway” (and I still believe that statement is true). My mother died because she was not a man.
My mother died because even though she had multiple factors that put her in the high risk category for what killed her - a rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm - she was missing the most important risk factor - she was not a man.
I know the 10,000 arguments against the above statement. Doctors are human. She had an existing confounding diagnosis. She waited too long to see a doctor. Or X. Or Y. Or Z.
People have a hard time looking at two statements when seem to contradict each other yet still be true at the same time.
My mother died because she was misdiagnosed. She would have died anyway.
