Image source: Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels
I admit it. I’m an overachiever. A perfectionist. A goody two-shoes. I’m terrified of making a mistake, of missing the mark. It’s why I’m an editor, and it’s why I dread my yearly doctor’s visit.
After graduating from college, I thought I was free from test results forever. Hip hip, hooray—no more anxiously awaiting my grades and feeling bummed if I got anything lower than an A. Ok, to be honest, while I received straight A’s quite easily in high school, when I went to college, I quickly learned that my high school had done nothing to prepare me for how difficult college-level courses would be. I received my very first F in my organic chemistry class, a grade that horrified me; so much so that I quickly decided at that moment that I would pivot to becoming an English major.
Once I entered the workforce, letter grades were a thing of the past. The new form of grading had to do with performance reviews, something that I was able to ace time and time again. I am a people person, and I got along with every boss I’ve ever had. I was a hard worker, and I learned that if I put in enough effort, I would be able to achieve or overachieve on my regular performance reviews.
But that is so not the case with my yearly doctor’s visits. I have had problems dealing with my weight for years, and my genetics (my mother is from the Philippines, and sadly, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders apparently have high incidence of diabetes due to where they store fat) leaves me prone to having both diabetes and high blood pressure.
Try as I might, I have such a hard time getting my health indicators down and in the healthy range. So, every year, I dread going to the doctor’s office. And because our doctors are so overstretched, we’re made to wait well beyond our appointment times only to have them finally come in flustered, with barely enough time to brusquely run through their yearly physical protocols.
During my most recent visit, I was seeing a new physician’s assistant who was particularly abrupt. When she noticed my weight had gone up, she looked at me accusingly and just asked, “Why?”
I could feel my face flush, and I hemmed and hawed and thought, well, duh, it’s because I was eating more and exercising less. But I’ve also been stressed. I got laid off from a job I had for decades earlier in the year. I was approaching perimenopause. I was trying to start my own freelance business. A million different reasons, none of which I shared with her because she was busy, and I was afraid of sounding like I was just giving excuses.
She coldly recommended a health coach and then walked out of the room to see another patient.
I was left to wait for the emailed visit results. And when they came, they showed me in vivid charts that my numbers were indeed moving in the wrong direction.
Now, I know what I need to do to lose weight: Eat less and move more. So easy, right? But of course, this is anything but easy. The CDC notes that between 2017 and 2020, 41.9% of Americans were categorized as obese. With nearly half our population hitting this number, addressing this health concern is anything but easy.
That statistic wasn’t a comfort to me, though. All I could think about after the visit was how demoralized I was, how much I hate going to doctor’s visits. How much I wanted to sit down and eat a bag of Doritos.
And I’m not alone. Overweight people fear going to the doctor because of the intense stigma surrounding weight. And, sadly, they have every reason to fear those visits. Reports have shown that doctors will ignore actual causes of adverse health symptoms (like shortness of breath) and automatically blame it on weight. For one patient in that linked New York Times article, the cause for shortness of breath wasn’t her weight, which the doctor had dismissed her with, but instead small blood clots in her lungs. The doctor was so focused on her weight that he neglected to check for a life-threatening issue that eschewing a bag of chips wasn’t going to resolve at that moment.
Of course, I will still go to my yearly check ins, but I’ve decided that I will strive to focus on my own well-being outside of those cold numbers and charts. I will be a stronger advocate for my own healthcare to overcome the inertia of cold capitalist hospitals pushing doctors to see more and more patients. The results I get back are not grades for a test. They are bits of information that don’t tell my whole health story. I don’t need to be afraid of them.
Comentarios