Kingdom of Knuffel

i'm studying humanities at a liberal arts college. and if i'm planning to take a break before grad school to do get the yoga instructor's license, and intern at a publishing house in my city. i'll simultaneously prepare for master's entrances; literary and cultural studies is my top pick right now.

ok that really pisses me off. they can't believe so much in their own knowledge being superior to the extent they think your disorder can't exist if they don't already know about it. like. overblown ego is understating it! you know your body best. i LOATHE the 'it's all in your head', i used to get it a lot when i tried to get help for IBS, and it's just demeaning. like, just because you, who are supposed to be professional, can't figure it out right away, does NOT mean i'm imagining it or that i can make it go poof with just an 'attitude change'. and i can't even begin on them saying you're hurting because you're fat, like???? how do they work that out? how does that even make sense??? like, 'you're fat so you're unhealthy so that's why you have these symptoms we can't make sense of. we can't make sense of them. but because you have symptoms, you're unhealthy. and you happen to be fat. so you're unhealthy because you're fat. there, we've tied it all together. yay' *slow claps* that is realllyyyy reaching.

i'm sorry to go off on a rant but like. i couldn't help it. these people are unbelievably stupid

yeah! good doctors are hard to come by, especially for chronic diseases, i think. they don't bother to do their research and they're impatient to boot. and it is such a pain to try to get them to research a bit; they're too egotistic even to take suggestions or talk through ideas you might have- which makes no sense because you're the one experiencing the illness. since ibs doesn't have a single cause (it's really just a collection of symptoms they've put under that name, so in that sense it's not really a single illness.) i was trying to find out triggers, and to rule out other diseases, diagnosable and with defined causes, that manifest with similar symptoms. it was like, impossible to suggest a test or suggest we rule something out, if the doctor themselves don't suggest it first! like there's no point even trying to bring up the research you yourself have done, or possibilities you yourself have thought of.

what's even worse... it's often disadvantaged people that doctors refuse to listen to.

and then everyone wonders why healthcare is in crisis, or why some people don't trust doctors.
like sometimes it feels like the last instead of the first resort.

I'm in the U.S.. It's awful here. People treat the disabled like total garbage. Especially if it's an invisible disease like all of mine.

Trying to get any sort of treatment is so difficult.

My latest doctor is more understanding, but she's just a general practitioner. There are a ton of things she can't do. She's been trying to get me in to see some specialists but that's not been going well at all.