“Our voices are our power.”
Serena Williams, the esteemed tennis star, recently spoke out about her experience giving birth to her daughter Alexis Olympia in an article with Vogue. A frequent sufferer of blood clots, Williams left her hospital bed a day after giving birth to tell a nurse that “she needed a CT scan with contrast and IV heparin (a blood thinner) right away”. The nurse, however, did not believe her, thinking she was just confused, and she had to insist to see a doctor who finally found blood clots. While this may appear to be one bad incident with one nurse one woman had, this is actually indicative of a much greater problem facing women and women of color, in particular.
According to an article in the Atlantic, there is a phenomenon in the medical community known as “Yentl Syndrome” where women have to essentially prove they’re actually sick or injured to be treated properly. This is evidenced by the fact that women wait on average 16 minutes more than men to to receive a painkiller for acute abdominal pain. This is probably due to the fact that women are expected to have and handle abdominal pain because of cramps, cysts and other related issues.
In fact, this behavior in the medical field of dismissing, minimizing and condescendingly responding to women’s health problems has led to women internalizing their own concerns. Harvard Health Publishing published an article that found that women are more likely to die of a heart attack than man because they wait longer and ignore their symptoms. Women have a median delay time before seeking medical treatment for a heart attack that is more than three times longer than men’s.
After Williams’ Vogue interview, she posted on Facebook about her experience, discussing the deluge of responses, especially from black women, with similar stories, and she discussed how the CDC recognizes that black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy complications than white women. She celebrated that women were speaking up saying that “This helps. We can help others,” and “Our voices are our power.” It doesn’t matter that Williams was a celebrity or a celebrated athlete, her health concerns were still ignored, at least in part because she was black and female.
Buzzfeed asked female member of its community for stories about pain not being taken seriously because of their gender and they posted 29 agonizing responses. Excruciating stories about kidney stones, ovarian cysts, torn ACLs and endometriosis, for example, being ignored were shared. One woman shared how a doctor ignored her staph infection because he thought she was being over dramatic because “she’s blonde and 15.”
When I was 17, I was hospitalized because I had severe tonsillitis that eventually resulted in my tonsils growing so large they almost covered my throat. I had been unable to eat and talk and was slowly losing the ability to swallow over the course over a week. I still remember sitting in the doctor’s office in excruciating pain when the doctor came waltzing in, joking about how I was back so soon and how his smile slowly dimmed as he saw how pale I was and how much weight I had lost. I was nearly septic. However, my tale pales in comparison to the women who were truly ignored and nearly died or actually died because their medical concerns were ignored.
If Serena Williams hadn’t spoken up and taken action, we could have easily lost a powerful and incredible woman, like too many of the women who die each year of easily combated medical complications.