Gynecologists I have loved

Posted on October 5, 2017 Updated on October 5, 2017

I recently blogged about problematic behavior in a physical therapy group, and now I’m excited to blog about wonderfully positive medical experiences.

At the gynecologist, no less.

The truth is, I’ve appreciated all my gynecologists, and I just visited my fifth one yesterday.

ONE
The first one said I didn’t need a pelvic exam when I was 16. That was enough to win my love. She also gave me a prescription for birth control, just in case I needed it. Smart.

TWO
The second one I visited several times when I didn’t have insurance. She worked at a clinic designed to serve poor people, which fit me perfectly during my early- to mid- 20s. She also served a lot of teens and visited high schools.

One time she said, “Assume the position.” I loved her for making me laugh with lines like that.

She may have been my first feminist doctor.

THREE
The third one delivered both my babies and found my breast cancer through early detection.

I visited him for ten years, during good times and bad. During my first visits, he would shake my hand hello and goodbye. At some point, maybe during or after the first pregnancy, the handshakes switched to brief, gentle hugs.

I gave him a hard time because rather than spend time shopping for his wife, at Christmas he would dress nicely and visit a local department store, where he would look helpless until women working at the store took pity (or spotted a commission) and did his shopping for him.

When he ran into patients in the community, he would say hello if it was a direct encounter, but he would avert his eyes if possible so he wouldn’t cause anyone discomfort. It was a funny kind of sensitivity he had about his work and his patients.

He and the nurses laughed during the first birth because I said things like “Holy cow” and “It still hurts a lot” (the latter when Callie’s head was out and I thought they needed to know that, well, I was still feeling a lot of pain because, well, there was still a whole body in there).

He and the nurses laughed and screamed during the second birth when Jace peed like a fountain all over them.

When I was going through the series of tests that led to my cancer diagnosis, each time I would see Dr. D for the results. He would say, “It’s probably nothing, but we should do this next step just to be sure.” The fact that I was screened at all as young as I was—it was unusual, and it was because he advocated for it.

Late in the breast cancer process, probably post-lumpectomy but pre-radiation, Dr. D stopped and looked at me. He said something about the way I seemed okay through it all.

I said, “It’s like almost getting hit by a car.” I was suddenly fighting back tears.

The gratefulness I feel to that man.

FOUR
Number four was a religious man, and that colored everything about him. I loved him for it. He had energy and exuberance and a passion for his work.

I visited him for ten or eleven years. He never knew me because I am not religious in the ways that he is, and I probably hold much wilder kinds of values than what he would appreciate, so I was never fully open with him.

But even though he didn’t know much about me, he was good to me, and he was good to all of his patients. It’s the person he is.

He left his practice at about the time that I moved away. He told me medicine was changing, or that it had already changed. He told me that he couldn’t be a doctor the way he wanted to be a doctor. Everything was being driven by money and budgets and numbers. He saw his life’s work being shunted, pushed aside, viewed as old-fashioned and useless.

I’m so glad he was my doctor. I trusted the person who was with me during many vulnerable moments for all those years. I’m sad that he retired in a way that was not fully celebratory. It isn’t right.

FIVE
And this brings me to yesterday. My first NY gynecologist. And I already love her.

In the waiting room, I felt like I had come home. Feminist material was more visible than Ladies’ Home Journal (though there was a fun selection of magazines, too!). The experience continued when I mentioned my pleasure to the physician’s assistant and she said it was all from Dr. M. She said I should be sure to stop on my way out and look at the photo book Dr. M’s daughter made after the Women’s March. (And you, Reader, should check out the 3 images from the waiting room at the bottom of this post.)

I found myself telling my brand-new gynecologist about my research on slut rhetoric. It’s not the typical first-thing (or ever-thing) I tell a doctor.

And then I talked about breast cancer with both the doc and the assistant, and we discussed the size of my breasts (in a completely normal way, oddly enough! a conversation I don’t think I’ve ever quite had with anyone else!), and I told them about an epiphany I had during my weeks of radiation that I had never told a doctor before, and we all gave an appreciative nod to doctor #3 for advocating for early screening. All in all, we decided, I had really been very lucky.

I have never felt so free to be openly myself in a doctor’s office as I was yesterday.

I imagine a very conservative pro-life person would feel very differently in Dr. M’s office, maybe the way I felt with doctor #4. I think Dr. M’s openness and integrity mean something; even if you’re not in her camp, you know who she is, and you can trust that she is going to advocate for her patients.

For me, who moved to a new state a year ago and still regularly does not feel fully at home, Dr. M and her office gave me a lovely surprise. I am incredibly grateful to have an activist and feminist gynecologist.

I feel cared for in a slightly different way than I ever have before.