The author during concurrent chemotherapy-radiation treatment in spring 2020. Courtesy of Taryn Hillin
Most doctors are intelligent, compassionate human beings, but they are human. And medicine is a business, which means doctors can be overworked, pressed for time and dismissive of patient complaints, especially if that patient is a woman. In my case, the casual dismissal of my symptoms almost cost me my life.
It was October 2019 when my new OB-GYN ― let’s call her Dr. Can’t Be Bothered ― gave me what I considered to be life-changing news.
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“You have a two-centimeter tumor on your uterine cervix,” she said, without even a hint of concern. For me, those words felt like a knife to the gut. A tumor? Me? How?
Then her phone rang, and she left the room.
By the time she returned, tears had welled up in my eyes. “Do I have cancer?” I asked, terrified and confused. As a non-doctor, when I hear the word “tumor,” my first thought is cancer. Hers was not.
“No, no,” Dr. Can’t Be Bothered assured me. “This is not how cancer behaves.” Then she added a sentence I’ll never forget: “For you to have cancer at this age, with this medical history, it would be like winning the lottery.”
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This did not make me feel better.
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