My Story: Being Invalidated by Doctors

SD talks about not being taken seriously by doctors when she was experiencing pain while using an IUD. She describes her experience with heavy menstrual bleeding, and how it affected her life.

Transcript:

SD: The doctors weren’t believing me! They were telling me it was fine, they were opening me up and saying, “Savannah there’s nothing wrong with you,” and I’m like, “Okay if there’s nothing wrong with me, then why can’t I walk? Like why can’t I stand? Why am I having such bad cramps that like—”  

I, this is maybe a little bit graphic but I’m glad there’s platforms like this to share it on. There were times where I could shut off the shower water and I, I could not stop bleeding like, for days at time, like, it would just run down my body like I could not just like— it was like insert a tampon, put on a pad in my underwear— I was bleeding terribly you know, and I— and so, for me, it’s like my doctors are not seeing this, they’re sort of not believing me, they’re not really listening to me I’m not allowed to go there when I’m on my period for them to even see, you know what I’m saying, like it was just bizarre to me and so um so much of it was researched on my own, I think, in some ways that was fantastic and, in some ways that was really harmful. I wish that there were more places that I could have gone to kind of get just a gut check.