It started with a verruca.
Gross? Possibly. Weird? Definitely. Given the state of the upper part of my body, the thing on the sole of my foot was literally and figuratively at the bottom of a long list of issues that needed attention. It had gotten so it hurt to walk and my thinking was that if there was an easy fix for something, I should do it. And so I went to see a doctor.
He was young, very young. But I reminded myself of my own age and realised that yes, it was possible that he had gone through medical school and practiced enough years to be allowed access to a basic verruca on the foot of a woman with a very complex medical history. ‘He can’t possibly fuck this up,’ I thought, ‘it’s…a verruca.’
There was the requisite embarrassing visual assessment, followed swiftly by typing, a lot of typing, and writing. It seemed very important to write down his notes and thoughts about my verruca. I felt like maybe I should just give him and my foot the room and leave and wait outside. The doctor focused solely on my, well, sole.
There had been a complication with said foot and a medication was prescribed. I left feeling like I’d had about ten seconds of eye contact, and a deep curiosity about his style of doctoring: write loads, listen little, prescribe, goodbye. But it was a verruca, the most non thing of things going on in my body.
At this point, I was five and a half months into surgical menopause, still healing from an operation to remove my ovaries and the bits of me they’d grown stuck to. A sore foot was a breath of fresh air in a smog of ailing body parts. Everything in my body hurt, the internal surgical wounds were far from healed, and the instantaneous plummet into menopause was, to put it mildly, fucking wild.
I’d lost my memory, my cognition had gone to shit, and I was bone-achingly exhausted. But, a few weeks after the appointment to show a strange doctor a gross thing on my foot, I began to get worse. I developed more symptoms, got more tired than I thought was possible, and learned that there were depths to brain fog I had never before experienced. And there was crying. So, much, crying. I was a hot mess.
Six weeks went by and I continued to deteriorate. I didn’t call the doctor I’d seen, because that’s what you do when you’ve been dismissed time and time again: ‘There’s nothing wrong, you’re just stressed.’ I’d learned that there was no point. I’d internalised a lesson that there was nothing wrong with my body, it was me, Lisa, who was the problem. But I could feel my body getting sicker. I called and made an appointment with a different doctor.
I didn’t plan on crying, it just happened. See above now six months post op, very early days for surgical healing and embryonic for surgical menopause. I sat down in the chair across a table from the doctor and began describing my symptoms and how I’d been feeling. As the words fell out of my mouth, the tears fell out of my eyes. I’d been holding it together, barely, and saying out loud what was happening in my body was very, very difficult.
The doctor listened intently, with eye contact. ‘This is good,’ a voice said in my head. ‘They’re listening.’ I asked could I take a tissue and I blew my very snotty nose and wiped my face, waiting for an answer, a diagnosis, a solution to why my meat suit was failing to heal.
“I think,” the doctor said, slowly, “it might be time to consider a psychiatric unit.”
The words travelled across the desk, sat in the air for a minute, gathered themselves into a fist, and punched hard, into my stomach. My chest tightened. Panic rose in me. Bile rose from my belly into my throat. ‘Don’t throw up,’ I shouted silently to myself. More words came across the desk at me, none of them making sense, just loud noise banging around my head. Psychiatric unit. Psychiatric unit. I’m going to be put in a psychiatric unit. What is even happening to me?!
I caught my breath and found my words. “How did I get to this place?” I asked. No answer was forthcoming. My allotted fifteen minutes was pushing on twenty. The doctor began wrapping up the appointment and I was pretty much speechless with the shock. I paid and drove home, feeling a fear I didn’t know was possible. In my journal that day, I wrote the following:
“06/03/24
…Today was a terrifying moment for me. I have potentially become a woman who need to go away for her ‘nerves'.’ It’s so bleakly scary. A facility awaits me. More drugs. More mental stress. A worser situation. How easily it can all slip away. How easily you can slip under the surface and drown.”
I was scared, out of my mind, for two days. A psychiatric day unit. For pain? For exhaustion? For GI problems? For….crying?
It may come as no surprise to read that I did not, in fact, need a psychiatric unit with “a team of doctors” to deal with me. What I needed…was a blood test. Flash back to six weeks prior, when Dr Verruca prescribed me a medication, without, it unfolds, reading my medical history. Without, I discover, bothering to find out what other medications I’m taking for contraindications. My thyroid had crashed, causing all of my symptoms.
The solution? Stop taking Dr Verruca’s prescription.
I did not need psychiatric care. I needed a blood test. Those two sentences say a lot about how the world sees sick women. How medicine sees sick women, since the dawn of time: hysterical, crazy, suffering with nerves, mentally ill.
It started with a verruca. The stupidest, silliest of things. Had I not the shred of strength left to think ‘go get your bloods done,’ had I not believed the tiny voice that told me the doctor was wrong, my life could have take a very, very scary step in a bad direction. Because of a verruca.
The moral of this story is listen to the voice inside you that whispers. It knows the truth. If you are a woman in this world built for men, trust your gut. And if a doctor spends more time writing than looking you in the eye and listening to you, walk out the door and say, ‘boy, bye.’
