Medical Sexism - being heard while female

My heart attack was in March of 2009. Seven months later, in October 2009, I jumped into women's heart disease advocacy via attending the WomenHeart Science & Leadership Symposium at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, which is a five-day intensive training program for women with heart disease--they take around 60 women each year (all of whom have some form of heart disease), out of a large number who apply.

With the training we receive at the Symposium, we turn our passion and our personal experiences of heart disease into real-world skills in advocating, educating, and supporting women with or at risk of developing heart disease. We leave the Symposium as patient-experts, equipped to become community leaders in women's heart disease awareness.

Since mid-2009, I have staffed information booths at health fairs, attended events in people's homes, in churches, in country clubs; I've run a support network, I support women with heart disease online, I write a blog. While I'm not an old hand, I'd say I'm fairly comfortable with my women's heart disease advocacy--how to do it and what my own particular strengths are.

However, I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to the broader patient advocacy movement, as I wasn't aware, until around six weeks or so ago, that an organization like the Society for Participatory Medicine existed. Chalk it up to an intense focus on my particular issue, if you will. But the fact is, I have only very recently discovered this broader movement to foster engaged, educated patients who are true partners in our own healthcare.

For years now, the folks in this movement have been urging healthcare professionals to listen to patients, to see us as a valuable resource. Or as my new friend e-Patient Dave says, "Let Patients Help."

I want to be an active, engaged, educated, empowered patient. I have educated myself, I am active in my care, I speak up about my needs. I'd give myself a solid "B" on my ability to be an e-patient. Doing pretty well, still room for improvement.

Imagine my dismay upon hearing that one thing I can't change -- my gender -- is held against me:

'Medical Sexism': Women's heart disease symptoms often dismissed

From the article: "Cardiologist Dr. Adam Splaver says a symptom like shortness of breath is too often dismissed as anxiety among women.

'In training, we were taught to be on the lookout for hysterical females who come to the emergency room,' said Splaver."

I am thankful, in this season of giving thanks, that the emergency room staff took my classic heart attack symptoms--chest pain that radiated down my left arm and up into my neck and jaw, nausea, and cold sweats--seriously and treated me appropriately, even as they told me that I was too young and too female to be having a heart attack.

And even as they wrote in my chart, but didn't say out loud to me, that it was possible that I was just suffering from "anxiety," they did an EKG, drew blood, did a chest X-ray, and gave me a nitro patch and an aspirin.

As they talked about esophageal spasms or acid reflux, they admitted me overnight for observation, just in case. When the second round of bloodwork showed up with elevated troponins, a stunned-looking doctor came into my room to give me the news that I'd had a heart attack. In the back of my mind, I was not surprised. I wouldn't have insisted that my husband drive us to the ER if I was just feeling a little "anxious" (yes, I've had a panic attack before, no, this was something entirely different).

I am reminded of my fun with chicken pox--not shingles--as an adult, around 12 years ago. Growing up, neither I nor my siblings had ever had chicken pox. When I worked in a hospital in the mid-1990s, one of our interns from overseas got it and as a result, all of us in the office who thought we'd never had it had to troop over to the hospital's Infectious Diseases clinic and give up a couple tubes of blood to be tested. My sample was the only one that came back marked "No varicella antibodies." Further proof that I hadn't even had a sub-clinical case as a baby.

Fast-forward to late 1999, after Thanksgiving. A small, strange bump appeared on my chest. After a couple more appeared on my torso, I wondered if it could be chicken pox. I showed my female boss, who'd raised two children. She thought they looked suspiciously like early-stage pox, so I went to my family doctor. They said "impetigo" and sent me on my way, all of my protestations that by the way, I've never had chicken pox seemingly going in one ear and out the other.

As more and more appeared, my certainty that it was chicken pox, and NOT impetigo, grew. I went back to the doctor. This time, they finally listened. They put me on Famvir, which did no good but might have if they'd prescribed it when I first showed up--and told my husband to watch for possible signs of pneumonia or meningitis, had me coming in to the clinic almost daily so they could check me themselves, and even once pulled in a med student working there, to look at me, as mine was a "very involved case" (IOW, I was a medical curiosity for the first, but not last, time in my life).

They never once apologized for not listening to me. Sometimes I have those "going back in time" fantasies. In this particular one, I would grab my physician by the lapels and ask him to look me in the eyes as I said slowly and clearly, "I HAVE NO VARICELLA ANTIBODIES."

I am reminded that the "P" in SPM stands for "Participatory." To me, that means a give-and-take, a conversation, where both parties listen to each other.

I'm talking, but who's listening?