On reading the article, The Gender Pain Gap by The New Scientist, I remembered a story my Nan told me about herself. I was quite young when she first told it to me, 11 or 12 I think, but I remember feeling so upset and angry at how she was treated. Articles like the one mentioned above help to explain what lead to her receiving poor care and remind us that gender bias is not easily removed once it’s institutionalised.
My Nan suffered a period of chronic pain when she was a young woman in the 1960s and her doctors response to that pain was to send her to a psychiatric hospital. Her pain couldn’t be that bad, she had to be ‘hysterical’, she was emotionally unstable, a malingerer, a drama queen. Her time at that hospital, whilst mercilessly brief, scarred her for life. It was a memory that she still recalled with horror a long while after she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Some time after her psychiatric hospital stay ended someone finally took my Nan’s pain seriously and she received an emergency operation which took away her pain. Fifty years later, her Grandaughter (me) developed chronic pain as a symptom of three different illnesses.
I struggled, like my Nan, to get my pain taken seriously. It took almost a decade to get the severity of my pain acknowledged but I still get medical professionals ‘huffing’ and ‘tutting’ when I mention the severity of my pain or flinch in agony. I have to list my conditions (Fibromyalgia, Lupus, Sjogren’s Syndrome) or get them to check my complete file with decades of notes and an array of medications to ‘prove’ my pain before they will take me seriously. I once had to debate a visibly hostile paramedic for 45 minutes as he interrogated me into ‘confessing’ my pain was in my head and a cry for attention. After 45 minutes I snapped at him to ring and check my records and after he did, he couldn’t of been nicer as he drove me to A&E. Like my Nan, I was also called a drama queen and one nurse even wrote in my notes that I was a liar.
Lupus and Fibromyalgia are conditions that predominantly affect women and as such, those type of illnesses receive less research, funding and pharmaceutical interest than illnesses that predominantly affect men. This disparity is leading many women to get misdiagnosed, ignored and under-treated. Women have, and will continue to suffer and even die because their pain is not taken seriously, as seriously as a man’s. The medical profession is often too slow to improve itself, as seen by the similarities in the way it has treated my Nan and me, fifty years apart. The gender pain gap has gone on too long. X
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