I Asked Doctors of Threads to Answer Honestly: Here's What Happened, Instead
These Are My Confessions - And Obsessions
My Threads PostEarlier this week, I was angry about the medical system in the US, and the care I've been receiving lately after having to educate and push my rheumatologist to run bloodwork testing for EDS, so I posed a question to the doctors in the Threads universe:
Why do so many of you consistently belittle and diminish the pain women go through, especially when it comes to reproductive health and chronic, invisible illness?
Threads has produced some beautiful and cooperative conversations - those I've even personally witnessed as they played out - but, I was throwing myself out there, positioning myself as a virtual punching bag if things went south. First, the comments trickled in slowly, and then the post exploded overnight. I was hoping to see genuine answers from doctors or current medical students. The stories I found instead will absolutely shock you.
Spoiler alert: Most of the comments - over one thousand, with around thirteen thousand likes as of this writing - were from patients, not doctors, and they weren't pretty. They were incredibly gruesome, in some instances.
The more I read, the more distraught I become. I genuinely feel my blood pressure rise with each case of medical neglect I consume. I'm forced to read them in increments because they're so heartbreaking, and I need to make sure I protect whatever is left of my mental health. I have not explicitly obtained permission to post any of the information from those comments here, but my account is public if you want to read them, linked above.
I used to have more trust in the medical system than I do now - never a ton, but more. My trust is now limited to the regularly scheduled doctors I have built a rapport with over decades, and a new gynecologist I am learning to trust after recently switching. I had already lost confidence in the ability of a specialist, Urgent Care or ER to listen when I'm in pain, but the information in these stories made me seethe with anger. It's time we start getting louder about what we are experiencing across the US, & internationally.
The gender bias in medicine is completely unacceptable. This doctor, Colene Arnold, Board-certified gynecologist, discusses and explains it in this video far better than I ever could. However, I want to put my two cents in after you've watched it.
Now that you've watched it, I'm going to tell you two stories, one featuring my husband and one featuring me. Both stories are set in the same environments - the exact same medical facilities - but have two entirely different outcomes. I am purposely leaving the gender out in each of these stories so that you have no bias going in. Keep in your mind a guess as to who received better care while you read them, and then I will tell you which story belongs to whom.
Story number one:
Patient arrives in hospital with 12/10 pain, complaining of intense back pain and a recent car accident that herniated every level of the spine. Patient did not drive themselves. Patient also found out they have hip dysplasia, and recently had surgery - a removal. Patient is in tears, shaking, body jolting and barely able to speak. Doctor barely speaks, gives 1 Norco and refuses to listen or speak to Patient when it doesn't work. Patient has to be heavily assisted out the door, and the doctor ignores them as they leave.
Story number two:
Patient arrives in hospital with 7/10 pain, complaining of intense pain in the chest after bathing a Great Pyrenees (ours) and hearing a pop. Patient drove themselves. Patient gets diagnosed with costochondritis & pleurisy, and is sent home with Tylenol 3. Toradol, and muscle relaxers. Patient walks into different ER days later because that runs out, gets CT, which finds pneumonia in the left lung as well as a bruised and enlarged spleen. Patient walks out with Norco, Toradol, & Baclofen. Then they go to the PCP, and the PCP prescribes a stronger dose.
Okay, did you guess who's who?
Drumroll, please.......
PATIENT ONE:
Me
PATIENT TWO:
My husband
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not minimizing my husband's pain at all. I'm just pointing out that I was treated incredibly differently in the same facilities. These same places had just treated me with what seemed like vitriol just weeks before, and babied him as if he were experiencing the most severe pain in the world. As a chronic pain patient, I'm not even asking for a prescription. I don't need one; I need help getting back down to my baseline pain level, and sometimes that takes stronger medication subQ or IV - when even the breakthrough pain becomes unbearable.
For the past several weeks, I've been quiet and keeping a lot of things to myself - things that have been absolutely ripping out my heart - but I should be writing. I should be pouring it all on the metaphorical page and letting others perceive me, whether they like me or not. It doesn't have to be pretty and seamless, wrapped up in a picture-perfect bow. I only have to show up and keep writing. That's all.
Instead of talking to and building the community I have wanted to create, I have let myself sink into my mattress, slowly but surely turning into the colorless Costco-grade memory foam that is absolutely not helping my spine or my hips. Unfortunately for us, the medical profession lets women down. It pretends it's there to help us, but, as the song says, they "never really studied the female body."
How can they purport to heal us when they don't even understand us? We haven't been worth their time - at, least, not enough for them to stop and say, "hey, guys, we should try to understand women & maybe stop torturing them medically for funsies. Let's study female bodies, for real."
What's bothering me most, though, is this. In February 2025, I was in a car accident on my way to work as a newly minted vet tech with 6 surgeries on the schedule. I remember being so fucking excited about everything finally happening. I was even starting to gain confidence with the pet parents - one of the scariest parts of working a room for me.
I was assisting in surgeries until I needed one myself - for DIE - and then came back for a few months, trying my best whenever and wherever I could. Even this weekend, I am helping with weekend clinic duties for two 1.5-hour holiday shifts. It's just very simple, light, kennel duties now.
That wasn't a threat; it's a diagnosis, I swear. It's called Deep-Infiltrating Endometriosis, and it - coupled with the ramifications of the car accident - ruined life as I had come to know and love it.
Because my health and pain levels have continued to worsen, I've lost the position I worked so hard to earn, and I don't think there's any way for me to come back, realistically. While I am still employed at the clinic for now, I know they won't wait forever, and eventually I will have to make the decision I've been putting off for months now.
Then, last week, as I previously mentioned, my husband injured himself while bathing our Great Pyrenees, which caused costochondritis, pleurisy, pneumonia in his left lung, and a bruised/enlarged spleen.
I know. 😬🤕
I started hurting more, myself, because I was - and still am, if I'm being completely honest - stressed and worried about his health and disregarding my own. That's not a complaint, it's an admission. I retreated even further into our mattress because I was able to use his need to rest as an excuse. It wasn't until I tried Brainspotting with my therapist - more on that later - that I started finding some motivation to put words across my Victus screen once more.
My therapist - let's call her Tiffany - had me turn off my camera & microphone and write for 5 minutes about a scene she'd briefly described. "Cammy," Tiffany cooed, "I want you to close your eyes; I'll close mine with you, but close your eyes, & imagine a sunset." I never understood exercises like these, as I couldn't relax enough to focus on a vision.
One of the things I struggle with is an inability to imagine things in my mind. If you describe something vividly enough, I can typically see it okay. However, I cannot easily create images in my mind if it's something I've never seen before. It takes a lot of concentration. With Tiffany, I was able to inhale...and exhale...in and out, while imagining a beautiful sunset with a bunny hopping through blades of freshly-mown blades of bermuda, and then something happened.
I started to type.
My fingers crawled across the keys, then began to dart back and forth as words flew onto the screen for the first time in weeks. I'd gotten myself into a creative funk with no way to dig myself out - or maybe, I didn't want to dig myself out yet. Maybe I needed a minute to wallow in my despair, and grieve the job I thought I'd be celebrating over a year of holding by now.
I don't think I had fully accepted it: the whole charade is essentially over - I won't be able to go back to tech work. It just isn't going to be possible when doctors keep considering my pain levels "mild" when I know any of them would be writhing in pain if they had to deal with just 5 minutes in my body. I also hadn't forced myself to start saying I'm an author.
I kept getting caught up holding myself to standards that, well...quite frankly, they didn't actually exist in the first place. No one is making me research for long, drawn-out deep dives every day, or at all - I am, and I can start by holding myself accountable for short pieces 2 to 3 times a week. If I write more than that, great! If not, who cares?
- My bare minimum, though?
- I'm forcing myself to quickly write and post these articles in 24 hours, start to finish. 2 to 3 times a week - how I feel, think, and see things, or pressing disability and chronic illness matters, like medical neglect and mistreatment.
I really like using Threads as a platform, but here's the thing: I've started placing myself within rigid character limits, trying to cram what I want to say into the first 500 characters or less because people have very short attention spans. That's a problem for someone who now wants to write as a steady career. Writing what I was classifying as "full-length" articles was absolutely terrifying, so I kept avoiding it. The longer I've waited, the harder it's become to not only dip my toes back in the water, but jump right in and post again.
I'll still be posting deeper dives, but I won't keep mentally constricting myself to them. Promise. I have a lot to say about medical care and politics.
I'm an author.
I'm an AUTHOR.
I'M AN AUTHOR.
Now, maybe one day, I'll actually believe it. 💜
*All thoughts written in this publication are my own, not the work of any form of robots.
I'm offering several newsletters, including one on canine care, while I write a comprehensive guidebook for new pup parents. Some of those posts will be free, while others require paid, tiered subscriptions.
My highest tier offers a group Discord for general pet help - no more than basic and general medical advice like core & optional vaccines, heartworm prevention, etc. - plus a monthly book/writing club and access to all paywalled newsletters.
While I would love to give you all my knowledge for free, I am barely making any money because of my disability. 💜
You can also donate to me directly via the button at the bottom of this page.
**If you want your story to be featured, email me at chronicallyme1@proton.me!
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