Project Kathan

Amrita, Hyderabad

Conversation through Instagram messages, November 19, 2024

in June 2022, I relocated to Bangalore for my job and was completely new to the city and was very overwhelmed and lonely there. To cope, I used to binge/stress eat a lot and basically sort of isolated myself a bit, would rarely go out. All of that lead to me gaining a lot of wait very fast. Almost like 10kgs+ in a span of 7-8 months. I couldn’t take the loneliness anymore and sort of ran back to Hyderabad to be closer to my friends and be in a city I’m familiar with.

So I moved back to Hyderabad towards the end of Jan 2023. I remember getting my periods on 1st Feb and it went on till 3+ weeks. I didn’t really want to go to a doctor because I have always been scared of gynecologists because of the things I have read up online, and a lot of stigma surrounding women’s reproductive health. Because of that I just kept on delaying going to a doctor until I was bleeding too much and loosing a lot of blood. So me and a friend looked up hospitals nearby with decent ratings and found a gynecologist who was supposedly in the field for 37+ years.
We booked an appointment with her. I told her that I was there because of my periods not stopping for 3+ weeks which made me very dizzy and weak due to all the blood loss. What followed was a lot of unsolicited advice and judgement from this doctor. She first asked me if I was in a relationship, I said no. She then asked me if I was sexually active, I said no. Then this woman proceeds to ask me if I think I’m pregnant.

I was like, umm what? Why are you even asking this to someone who’s not sexually active and menstruating for so long. Then she proceeded to sort of body shame me, and just assumed that I always eat junk processed food and I’m very lazy and all (which was partly true, but all of them she just assumed even without me telling her about it myself). Then she gave me a lot of gyaan of how I should do yoga or something, loose weight, make lifestyle changes, etc. She asked me to get an ultrasound done, which concluded with me having PCOD (a bit of context here: I was first diagnosed with PCOD in 2019, but never had any major issues with my periods that would make me have to see a doctor). She didn’t prescribe any meds to me for my PCOD, just told me to exercise regularly. I later found out from my current gynecologist that I should have been given some meds considering the ovary size as per the ultrasound was too high.

She also gave me meds to make my periods stop, and even before prescribing she was like are you sure you’re not pregnant??
And I was just exhausted by this point. I took the meds which did help in stopping the periods, but I was thoroughly traumatised by the entire process.
I later went to another gynecologist a week later who also gave similar tips and told me to loose weight. Both of these doctors were pretty rude in the way they talked. Considering how scared I’m of gynecologists it definitely made things difficult for me. I remember having a similar situation few months afterwards where my periods didn’t stop for 1+ month, but because of these two incidents I just thought it would be better to give it some time to stop on its own. But again things got worse and I had to visit another gynecologist (I have been seeing this one for the past 1+ year now) and she’s pretty good. But because of how scared I was, I literally had two of my friends come with me for moral support and even then I was very anxious.

I’m still very nervous of going to doctors but especially gynecologists considering all the judgements they tend to bring with themselves. It’s very hard to find a nice and kind gynecologist who won’t traumatize us in the process

I haven’t had a lot of bad experiences with doctors from other fields. But with gynecologists, it’s very difficult to find someone who’s not going to jump to conclusions even before you opening your mouth to tell them why you’re there.