AN ELDER’S TREE | Misdiagnosis and age
“We Don’t Think Cellulitis is a Thing”
A doctor said that to me and could not have been more wrong
CW: Graphic photographs of a skin disease below.
If it had been the first time I heard it said, I would have blown up in his face. But I will thank a recent ER doctor for being young and cocky enough to blurt out exactly what was on his mind. In unforgettable words.
“We don’t think cellulitis is a thing!”
Was that group speak, or the royal use of we? I thought, from his attitude, probably both.
I have met a number of doctors who, if not completely in agreement with him, do not have a clue about what cellulitis is, or how to treat it.
Few of their patients know enough about it, either. Not in the beginning. But we can tell how we’ve experienced it! With a good deal of pain and worry.
There seems to be a prejudice cocktail imbibed by some doctors, based in misogyny, since older women are more prone to the condition. It is as if a diagnosis has been served with a twist of ignorance: mixing jokes about cellulite with cellulitis.
