"Nerves, anxiety and PTSD"

It's taken a lot for me to pluck up the courage to post my story.

You want my experiences from the last 3 years?  Try 45.  What I have been put through has led me to where I am today.  That's why it is relevant.

In 1973, I saw a GP for depression.  He told me I needed a holiday and perhaps I should buy myself a new hat!

I can only give a sample of my experiences here as there are too many to relate.  But I remember them all in great detail.  Nobody ever wanted to listen to me or take any notice.  I've lived with this mental and emotional pain all my adult life.

In 1977 I gave birth to my first child, a daughter.  I was in hospital for 3 weeks, admitted unexpectedly, when I had only gone for a routine ante-natal check-up.  I was put in a bed on an empty ward to begin with, and given no information at all, other than that my blood pressure was 'a bit high'.  For the next 3 weeks I was bullied, picked on and shouted at.  For being out of bed, for having my nails too long, for wearing nail varnish, for having my nightie too long.  (It had been bought by my husband in an emergency.)  

One Saturday morning the doctors came on their rounds and decided to induce me there and then.  I was manhandled up the wide staircase by two nurses, one under each elbow, and put on a drip.  Then they pumped me full of pethidine and left me.  I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next 8 hours.  When my daughter was being born I was made to lay on my back and push.  She was small for dates and jaundiced, and I was told I had to get as much liquid as possible into her, or she would have to go to the special care baby unit.  That was where I got the idea that they would take my baby away.  I was trying to breastfeed, and at the same time the nurses were lining up bottles of formula, bottles of sugar water and bottles of plain water on my bed tray.  I was so confused, and terrified of being shouted at for doing the wrong thing.

They made me feed her every 3 hours on the dot.  That coincided with mealtimes and visiting times.  I wasn't allowed to feed on the ward when visitors were about, so I was sent into a side room, where I panicked because I thought my husband wouldn't be able to find me.  A nurse came and loomed over me, demanding to know 'How long has she had?'  'I don't know, she keeps falling asleep'.  'WHY DON'T YOU KNOW?'  Of course it was the pethidine I'd been given during labour.

I was confused, exhausted and terrified.  One afternoon at 5 to 3 a jolly-hockeysticks physio came breezing in just as I was asleep, but trying to prise myself awake knowing I'd got to feed the baby in 5 minutes.  She said, 'Come on, follow me' and I dragged myself out of bed, along corridors and down stairs into the bowels of the building to a gym, where we were made to do physical jerks on rubber mats.  I just lay there.  I was so tired.  Also I was afraid that someone would come to the ward and find me missing and I'd be shouted at again when I got back.

A staff nurse shouted at me for sitting up in bed writing a letter one morning, when we were supposed to be lying on our stomachs for an hour for the dreaded 'tummy time'.  I never could lie on my stomach, it was too uncomfortable.

When I finally got home with the baby I was a nervous wreck.  I still thought I had to do everything by the book and in my imagination an ambulance would draw up outside and two burly ambulance men would get out and drag the baby out of my arms and take her back to the hospital, because she was the hospital's baby, not mine, and I wasn't a fit mother.  I know now these are symptoms of post natal depression, which I had for up to a year afterwards.  It was never diagnosed or treated.  I was even terrifed of my Health Visitor at first, because I thought she would report back to the hospital.  In the event, she was the saving of me.  I don't know what I would have done without her.  Maybe I or my daughter wouldn't be here.

2 years later I had my second daughter, and by then I was much more confident.  But the day after her birth, I'd just fed her and was enjoying a cuddle.  A young nurse barely out of her teens marched up to me and said I should put her down straight away because I was 'making a rod for my own back' and the baby would 'come to expect it'.  I retorted that if she'd just been through what a new-born had just been through, wouldn't she want a cuddle too?  And she turned on her heel and stalked off without a word.  I felt triumphant!

Down the years I have been through so many experiences like these.  I tried to tell my GP at the time how I'd been treated in hospital, and he refused point blank to believe me.  I thought there was no point in trying to complain or tell anyone after that, because I thought no-one else would believe me either.

Over and over again I have been dismissed, shouted at, ignored, insulted, fobbed off and often brought to tears by insensitive remarks and crass comments.  I have been blamed instead of helped.

Until earlier this year I hadn't been near a doctor for at least 10 years, a fact that has been commented on by the GP I saw recently as well as the endocrinologist I have just seen at the hospital.  What I have been through historically and habitually is the reason why.  I just couldn't take any more.

A few weeks ago, I had to go to the surgery for a blood test.  As the nurse called me in I felt the panic rising.  I told her I didn't want to be there, and tried to give her an idea of why I was so nervous and panic-stricken.  All she said was, 'It's all in the past - forget it!'  And she said that twice.  I was overwhelmed with feelings of anger, disgust and 'Oh no not again!'  After everything I've been put through for so many years, to be invalidated and silenced like that yet again was more than I could bear.  

For years all I've wanted is to be listened to with sympathy and understanding.  An apology would have been nice too, but now after all this time it would be too little, too late.  Some of the worst culprits are now dead themselves.  Personally, I have suffered from nerves, anxiety and PTSD ever since.  No-one has ever taken me seriously, or believed me, or been bothered to listen.  I've been made to feel like a nuisance, a complainer and a waste of time and it's been made clear to me by various people's attitudes that no-one wants to hear what I've got to say.  I now suffer panic attacks at the mere thought of having to enter a doctor's surgery and often feel physically nauseous and faint.  It's the fight or flight mechanism.

As medical people, I want to say to you, you never know who is going to walk through your door.  You don't know their history, or what they may have been through, or what their mental or emotional state might be, but one thing we all deserve is to be treated with respect.  Some people, like me, may be extremely fragile.  It's not right to snap at people and have them ending up too utterly petrified of going near any doctor or nurse.  Kindness and compassion are not things which can be taught - you either have them or you don't.  And they are both things which I have found through bitter experience to be sadly lacking in the medical profession to the extent that I have concluded it to be endemic.