A Letter to the Doctors
© From Lexy
A Letter to my doctor
From Lexy
Dear Doctor, I wanted to write and tell you some things that I can never seem to explain to you when I make an appointment to see you. What I experience when I come to your office is very different from what most of your patients experience. I thought that, if I explained what happens to me when I come to see you, it might help us both, and some other patients, too.
You see, doctor, I am a survivor of childhood abuse. I often need to see you because the trauma I suffered in the past still has physical effects on me in the present. For example, sometimes I am not able to sleep because of the nightmares and flashbacks that still haunt me. There are times I suffer insomnia for weeks on end, and I want to ask you for something to help me sleep. When I see you, though, I never seem able to express these things to you clearly. Then I worry that you and your staff might have labeled me a hypochondriac because I have come in for no apparent reason. I have wanted to explain why this happens but get tongue tied when I try.
This sounds silly, coming from a grown woman with an education, a career, and a "good" life, but I crumble in the face of authority I freeze and become intimidated. You may not feel that you are intimidating, but your office and the position of doctor is. Often, the abuse I suffered was blamed on me and I was told that it was necessary to "make me better." Making me better - isn't that what doctors do? I hope you see the connection.
Medical settings in general are very frightening for me. When I sit in your office, having dutifully had my arm squeezed by the blood pressure cuff (and having tried not to flash back to hurtful hands doing the same thing), I see all of those instruments you have around. I study each one and wonder what pain you are going to need to inflict on me with one of them. I see the anatomy models you have of organs. The heart one bothers me most. I saw a still-beating heart in the body of a dying woman before I was old enough to even know what a heart did. I see the used needles through the plastic of the sharps disposal container; I try not to think about the times needles were used to "teach me to behave." I sit and I wait for you, surrounded by all of these links to the terror with which I was raised.
