Testimonials

These are some of the responses I got to my survey. They all came from people under 25. I couldn’t put them all in my paper, so here they are anonymously. Some of these stories are hard to read.

I came to a my medical provider with mental health concerns, and was literally told that this was a “spiritual” problem and I should seek spiritual counsel, not provided with medication or a diagnosis. I asked for STD testing and was talked over and felt like I was wasting their time just by being there. I hate bringing issues to my healthcare provider because my experiences are often like this.

In therapy, I would always have to justify the way I was feeling and try to make my nonblack therapists understand my experiences even though they brushed it off

I had to convince a pediatrist that he didn’t properly numb my foot before starting an operation. He was going to continue without administering more numbing injections until I begged him to do it properly.

Last year I was experiencing severe lower abdominal pain for several months and went to multiple doctors to try and figure out what was going on, all of which brushed it off as “uterine issues,” without following up with any labs or tests to help diagnose the issue. One doctor even told me to “drink more water and stretch” because at my age, it was “highly unlikely for anything sever to be going on. I was finally able to find a different doctor who took my pain seriously, and it turned out that I had a mild case of Crohn’s Disease, which can cause multiple complications if left untreated.

I live in a low income neighborhood in NYC. I found out i had breast cancer through personal advocacy of pain in my chest. They had indicated that “young girls like me exaggerate pain”

I have felt like my description of symptoms wasn’t taken seriously. It turned out I have a globular aneurysm(2mm benign “mass”) in my brain. I believe it was causing me headaches and it apparently my veins and arteries have more loops than other people, so I get migraines when the blood can’t flow correctly due to the loops.

I always felt like what I was feeling was not as serious especially since doctors would say “oh it’s nothing.” So my mom has always told us that we have to exaggerate our symptoms so that way they can listen to us and treat us.

My mom went to a local doctor for months with stomach pain. They told her repeatedly that it was just a stomach bug and disregarded her consistent pain. She took OTC medicine for weeks, but nothing helped longterm. We decided to take a roadtrip to Minnesota from Georgia. Her stomach was still hurting the whole way. By the time we got to our hotel in Minnesota, she checked us in but had to go to a local clinic. She was literally bent over in pain by this point, almost like she was in labor, pain. We got to the clinic and she filled out some forms. Mom asked if they could see her quickly since she thought something was very wrong. The women at the desk kinda brushed her off until my mom started throwing up alot. They put her ahead on the patient list so we could see the doctor sooner. Mom described her pain (the same way she did back home in Georgia), and this doctor immediately went to get equipment for an ultrasound. Turns out mom had gallstones! The doctor was really confused as to why back home they didn’t check because mom was describing typical symptoms for the conditions, and she visited the doctor in GA multiple times with said symptoms. Long story short, mom needed emergency surgery because she had so many stones by then that the new doctor didn’t feel morally sound sending us back home. Mom and I rode in ambulance to the hospital, she was given morphine since the pain was so severe, and after checking into the hospital she got surgery to remove her gallbladder the day after. My dad and stepdad had to drive up from Georgia so my stepdad could stay with my mom while my dad took me back home. This whole thing was dragged out for months and was only dealt with hundreds of miles away from home because one doctor didn’t listen to their patient like they’re supposed to do.

Because we were Asian they took forever for us to go in; people that came after us even went inside way before us. We complain about it but all we got was just an excuse that other people came for PT and I see them coming out with doctor. Definitely not want to go there anymore but still needs to get some more treatment from them so we can’t do anything.

My mother was giving birth her pain was ignored by medical professionals. She had to constantly tell them what they were doing was painful, but their was no urgency or desire to help.

My mother described pain to several doctors and they didn’t listen. It ended up that she had a uterine fibroid growing all the way to her chest. My grandmother died in a care facility because they didn’t monitor if she had bed sores or not. She died from sepsis.

My mother was incorrectly diagnosed and denied opioids for a severe condition because the doctor said “her demographic always got addicted.”