BY
DESIGNER
When I was seventeen, I was lying in my doctor’s office post-heart-surgery, glancing over at the anatomy of the human body when my doctor concluded: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you; you’re just anxious.’ I gathered my thoughts along with my clothing, and replied: ‘But I’m not just anxious; I know anxiety, I have that, but this is something other, something very different – I am really not very well at all.’
This was one of many times I had requested a test from my doctor. But this time I was asking for something more: to be taken seriously.
Months later I was in intensive care, being monitored for a suspected heart attack or a stroke. I experienced paralysis. The single most terrifying experience of my lifetime. So many symptoms – it felt as though I was the medical example of every disease going.
Stomach paralysed. Blood-sugar levels rising and dropping to dangerous levels. Constant nausea. Breathlessness that caused me to avoid speech. Legs that were purple due to lack of circulation. Eyes unable to see due to blood loss to the head. Finger unable to lift from my bedside due to the absolute exhaustion that consumed me. A grey pallor. The inability to even smile. The ‘Charlotte’ look to my eye now gone. And then the trembling for months on end due to the shock of it. The long days and nights spent waking up in a pool of my own urine and sweat, unable to move and at times to shout for help. A nineteen-year-old baby is what I was. Or a ninety-year-old nineteen-year-old – being washed with a cloth and hydrated with a straw held up to my mouth.
I was fighting the most brutal war I could have ever believed possible. An unexplained war. I felt bruised, damaged and entirely let down by the medical professionals in whose offices I spent so long crying for help.
From ages fifteen to twenty-three I have spent my years in and out of hospitals and doctors’ appointments. It saddens me to say that throughout this time I have experienced a few too many white-coated men repeating what I had heard time and time again (even with physical diagnoses): ‘You’re just anxious.’ I found this humiliating – as an anxiety sufferer I feel anxiety deserves more respect as a serious illness – but I was also appalled at the sheer closed-mindedness of the comment when I was clearly suffering.
I cannot count the amount of times I was told it couldn’t be anything more serious as I was a young girl who looked OK. Or the amount of happy pills I collected over the years.
From my experience, I have come to realize that there is a far deeper-rooted issue within this system. In particular, that young women’s voicing of concerns isn’t accepted or as valued as, what I can assume, a middle-aged black-suit-wearing male’s worries would be. Can you imagine such a man paralysed in his own circle of urine, being told he is ‘just anxious’?
I am incredibly lucky to say that those days of darkness are behind me and I now live a full life. I appreciate that those doctors were simply trying to do their best with what knowledge they had. But, on a human level, the disbelief I encountered from sharing what was happening to me has undoubtedly left scars. PTSD, clinical depression and anxiety attacks are what remain with me.
BUT WITH DARKNESS
COMES LIGHT.
AND THAT LIGHT COMES
WHEN YOU CREATE
POSITIVE CHANGE.
Feminism: ‘the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.’*
Shouldn’t this be what we are all fighting for?
*Definition from the Oxford Dictionary of English.