i drew this roughly a year into an ordeal that started in february of 2014 that has shaped my life for the worse ever since. it looks like complete ass, because A. i wasn't as good an artist in 2015 and B. i was in a lot of fucking pain when i was drawing it.
today, i finally saw an orthopedic specialist who did NOT brush me off. i have a new diagnosis of "tendonitis of the shoulder and wrists". which is very common stuff. very easy to spot if you know what questions to ask and know what to look for; i had suspected it for years. after two years without a diagnosis, i had given up and tried to adapt on my own, and i did a pretty good job all things considered! but things got worse again in December of 2023, worse than they've been in a while, and i crashed and burned.
tendonitis is very treatable. i'm going to PT soon. there's plenty of reason to believe that even if i can't make a full recovery at this point, there's a lot of room for me to get better. but i've had 10 years of my life stolen from me. i haven't been able to work a full-time job partly because of this. i haven't been able to improve all of the skills i want to because i'm so limited in what i can do in a day. i don't have the stamina to do things i want to do, like sometimes open commissions or release a new full illustration at least once a month. i've missed out on a lot of video games; i don't get to play or finish many of them because it's too painful and i can't justify the flare-ups it tends to cause. it's been a real fucking bummer of a decade for me.
goddamn tendonitis. my entire life was upended by an extremely common type of RSI because i was not taken seriously by doctors. because, you know. a young woman? it's probably her wandering uterus, or depression or something. i have been abused and gaslit and neglected so much that i can't get a decent blood pressure reading inside a doctor's office anymore because i am so, so afraid of being abused. i was at one point told that my pain was just depression, tried an SSRI, and found out the hard way that i have a sensitivity to them that results in extreme anxiety and panic attacks. one of my useless visits in 2015 ended in, i am not kidding (but i also won't go into detail) a nurse practitioner assaulting me. i dropped out of college, got traumatized, got assaulted, got two new phobias... because i had goddamn tendonitis and nobody believed it. imagine if you went to the doctor with a bad ear infection and they went "sounds like depression", left the room, came back with a folding chair and just started whacking you with it. honestly, if it had all happened that quickly instead of a slow-drip of mistreatment it'd have saved me a lot of time.
diagnosis could have happened years ago. years ago. years ago. but my doctors didn't think anything real could be wrong with a 22 year old woman, and the trauma of how badly i was mistreated in 2014 kept me discouraged and scared. so here i am, nearly 33, still in pain, still suffering. spent last night basically having a prolonged panic attack.
there's no recourse for me. there will be no justice for any of this. i don't have the evidence or the stamina for a legal battle. i've at least reported the nurse practitioner who assaulted me, but i have no proof, so it'll probably never go anywhere unless she hurts other people (and i would prefer that didn't happen!).
but i made it. i'm still here. i adapted, i got a bit more productive through my own efforts, enough to start a SHOP! and i finally worked up the courage to try to get diagnosed and treated again.
if i could go back in time, this would be my advice to myself:
-never give your full trust to a general practitioner or a nurse practitioner. they're note dispensers, mostly. they can handle simple stuff like needing some sudafed or w/e but mostly they exist to get you a note for work and a referral to someone who actually knows things. if they aren't helping you, learn what kind of specialist you need and tell them you want a referral.
-ESPECIALLY never trust a general practitioner who wants to prescribe you antidepressants. they don't know what they're doing with that shit! those are life-saving drugs, but if they go wrong, there can be serious consequences and you need proper support from someone who knows more about mental health than how to give you a depression assessment survey.
-show up with a page of bullet-point notes of what's going on, what you've tried, what works, what doesn't work, etc. and just hand that sucker over. make them read it. they can read faster than you can talk, and they'll get your organized thoughts rather than your nervous rambling.
-practice your self-advocacy. have conversations with an imaginary doctor in the shower. decide what you're going to say if it sounds like they're going to dismiss you.
-bring a notepad. visibly take notes during appointments. (you know the notebook scene in Hot Fuzz? that shit works on doctors.)
-if you have someone you trust who's willing to come to your appointment and be in the room, a lot of doctors suddenly become WAY MORE HELPFUL when they're no longer the only person in the room with the patient.
and to all doctors who are sexist, fatphobic, racist, ableist, otherwise bigoted, or just plain full of themselves and fucking dismissive of their patients: if there were such a thing as hell, you'd belong there. if my shoulder gets any better i might dig it myself.
