I Have Always Been A Storm
Mash up of Stevie Nicks and James Norbury references today, as I’m currently caught up in a medical storm of sorts. I went to the doctor yesterday for a pressure test to confirm I have chilblains, which he confirmed, but not before giving me a long mansplanation about how in his opinion I’m actually mentally ill. My husband and I both felt whiplashed by this conversation, considering I went in to get my feet examined which fell by the wayside at lightning speed to become a grilling about how I should accept that I have Illness Anxiety which is causing me to be fatigued—not my #MyalgicEncephalomyelitis
I’ve spoken with an ME charity who gave some advice, but they also said that though my doctor is medically obliged to abide by the World Health Organization’s categorisation of MECFS as a neurological disorder, this doesn’t stop some doctors from wrongfully categorising it as a mental illness.
It is frustrating having to spend what energy I do have on trying to self advocate for treatment, then having to spend my nights reading up about the DSM criteria for Somatic, Illness Anxiety, and Conversion Disorders. I asked the doctor how I could prove that I’m not mentally ill and his answer was “with difficulty because (people like me) have a hard time accepting that they aren’t physically ill.”
The greatest insult in this statement is that he dismissed all my private lab tests as being pseudoscience, but when I challenged him to produce scientific evidence to confirm his Illness Anxiety diagnosis, he basically used a Fallacy Argument to prop up his hot take.
In my ordinary life, I would consider this farce, but as doctors are gatekeepers—I am being denied access to medical care based on someone’s whim. One which seems to have made it’s way into my medical history so that wherever I go within the NHS, this black cloud will inevitably follow.
Like us #ChronicIllness sufferers don’t have enough to deal with already, but as Stevie sang “Never have I been a blue calm sea, I have always been a storm.”
#MyCondition #ChronicFatigue #MightyTogether #MightyMusic #MightyBookClub