Clinical Undiagnosis Ian Stafford Course: Creative Nonfiction Professor: Martha Witt, English Students: Ian Stafford Essay: Clinical Undiagnosis
Assignment: In this course, students were asked to complete a multistep assignment that included reading model personal essays, free-writing about significant life moments, and observing ways in which those moments reflect larger
global issues and/or realities. Writing exercises leading up to this essay focused on dialogue, setting, rendering the characters of those involved and, finally, workshopping and revising.
When my shop gets a call from home, it can be joyous—tiny voices on the other end of the line, eager to relay a happy event, or stressful—appliance failures, landlord troubles, a myriad of other “joys” of adult life. This call was the latter; nothing prepares you for the gut-check at hearing your child say “Dad, mom needs you to come home, she’s on the bathroom floor.” Healthcare was something I had always taken for granted until I met my wife. For the entirety of our relationship, she’s been plagued by lingering health issues. The biggest of these—migraines— are something that at their worst-best make her move slow throughout the day, and at worst-worst completely knock her out of commission. Aside from the obvious frustrations this causes, the most nagging one leaves any relief bittersweet. For all the time we’ve spent in pursuit of answers, no doctor has been able to pinpoint the root cause of the issues; she is “heard” but ushered out the door with platitudes and false hope. Walking away from a doctor so many times
empty handed makes you feel like you’re being gaslit by an entire industry. This is compounded further by the fact that she is not alone in this inattention; across the world a vast majority of women have found themselves receiving substandard reactions towards their maladies. Before we started dating, I had never been confronted with the possibility that equal treatment didn’t exist at the doctor’s office. From the first time I accompanied her to an appointment to our most recent health emergency, our story is the tangible evidence that has convinced me that the medical field has critically failed a significant number of women. In 2018, a New York Times article referenced a survey of 2,400 women, 83% of whom experienced a difference in how they were treated based on their gender. With a population that slants more female, applying this statistic over America to predict how many women throughout our country don’t get the care they deserve paints a grim portrait of clinical malfeasance. Looking outward, if this number 35
