Reaction to flu jab and other matters pertaining to being female

[OverthinkersAnonymous]

I had a flu jab last week and was ill afterwards for 48 hours, then back to "what I call normal".

I reported my reaction to a nurse practitioner at the GPs. The flu jab, which I have every year, caused a bad reaction this time. But instead of believing me and making a note to report the reaction, the nurse lectured me on how it couldn't possibly have happened.

A friend of mine wanted a GP appointment because of her wheezing, concerned she might have asthma. Her surgery sent her for a chest x-Ray but didn't actually see her.

My mother went to the doctor with 3 problems, all related. She was told she could only talk about one of them. As it turned out, she had terminal secondary cancer.

I'm a fan of the NHS, I worked in it for several decades. But the way in which women are disbelieved and their concerns minimised by medical and nursing professionals is shocking. I think this is because we are women, not worthy of believing or being listened to by "experts".

Medical misogyny is a documented phenomenon.

There's an Xray guy on Instagram who pops up every now and again on my feed, there'll be a photo of a obviously badly broken bone in pieces and the comments are 80% "if the patient is female, it's anxiety, tell her to take an aspirin; if male it's a broken bone and needs immediate surgery"

I mentioned to a doctor over 10 years ago I thought I had endometriosis. They shrugged and said if I didn’t want the pill, they couldn’t do anything and painful periods were normal
3 years ago the pain started really really badly and nobody was listening about the pain
finally got a female consultant who listened to me and operated
I just got my report back from post op (8hrs to excise it all) this week…. Otherwise known as “I told you so”

Your large right ovary contained 3 endometriomas and was morbidly adhered to the right pelvic sidewall as well as your fallopian tube and rectum
Your large sigmoid bowel was folded over and adhered to the right ovary
Your left ovary is enlarged with 3 more endometriomas and again stuck to the left pelvic sidewall and rectum
Your left fallopian tube is normal, the right is dilated
You had superficial lesions over your bladder

I reported my reaction to a nurse practitioner at the GPs. The flu jab, which I have every year, caused a bad reaction this time. But instead of believing me and making a note to report the reaction, the nurse lectured me on how it couldn't possibly have happened.
Some Drs and nurses are almost evangelical about flu jabs. It's not about not listening to you because you are a woman.

A friend of mine wanted a GP appointment because of her wheezing, concerned she might have asthma. Her surgery sent her for a chest x-Ray but didn't actually see her.
Surely seeing her before requesting an xray would have delayed the process? It's nothing to do with her being a woman.

My mother went to the doctor with 3 problems, all related. She was told she could only talk about one of them. As it turned out, she had terminal secondary cancer.
I'm sorry to hear about your mother. But this practice of one appointment per problem has been around since Blair was in power. It's nothing to do with her being a woman.

Basically you are ranting on the wrong board. Men, women and children have the same issues regarding your points.

I don't think anyone of those examples are because the patient was a woman.

My Dad refuses to have the flu jab because he's scarred he'll be unwell afterwards and is repeatedly told that never happens.

Being referred directly for a chest xray is better than seeing a GP?

It's well known that you need another appointment if you want to talk about about more than one issue. I agree that's madness and who's to say which symptoms are connected, but it's the same for everyone.

Medical misogyny is very much a thing and there is overwhelming evidence that women’s symptoms are frequently ignored or belittled, when a male with the same presentation would be taken seriously.

but… in this case I do think that it’s equally likely that you met a flu vaccine evangelist who might have been equally dismissive regardless of who you are.

Most people are fine after the flu vaccine, and others have only mild side effects, but some people do have worse effects and this is documented in the literature. I am sorry that you were in the latter group this year, and by way of reassurance, I will say that it doesn’t necessarily mean you will have the same experience in future seasons.

If you are still suffering, you can take paracetamol or other medication for a minor illness to manage your symptoms. If your symptoms don’t resolve and are getting worse, don’t worry about going back to your GP practice. You can also report your symptoms to the yellow card scheme.

I hope you are feeling better soon.

I know this won't solve your problems with the surgery but you can report the reaction to the flu jab yourself via the yellow card scheme (easily Googlable) and it's worth doing in case it was a bad batch or not stored properly or something and no one will know this unless people report it. They reckon only about 10% of reactions/side effects are reported. You should have been given the batch number when you had it done or the surgery should be able to provide this if you haven't kept it.

Definitely a thing.

I went to the GP with severe back, period cramps and side pain - cue blood tests, told to take patacetamol, then questions about my drinking (?), if it affected the family (one gin maybe 3 times a week), how my husband (?) felt about my concern, asked about my job, if my high stress job impacted my family, it was finally suggested I had anxiety and i was instructed to abstain from alcohol for 1 month and have a repeat blood test.

3 months later it was found i actually had an ovarian cyst when it ruptured.

DP went with back ache - sent for an xray that day, prescribed cocodamol, ultrasound within 2 weeks, blood tests, he admitted he drinks excessively. He was just told to "try and cut down". Turned out he just had a pulled muscle.

Its happening again. I go with debilitating perimenopause symptoms and get offered the fucking coil. Hes had a bit of shoulder pain, off he goes for an MRI in 2 weeks 😤

"Ranting on the wrong board" is very unkind. I'm not ranting, and this board is where I wanted to discuss the matter, as I made clear.

I agree that men and children can also have bad experiences with the health service, but this post is about the minimisation and dismissal of women's concerns. I wrote a post because of how my report of my flu-jab reaction was met, but I could have given other examples. As a young woman, I went into hospital having a miscarriage, bleeding and in pain. The doctor suggested I didn't really want a baby, did I? A few years later, 8½ months pregnant with my first child, I had a routine hospital appointment with an obstetrician. The male doctor approached my trolley in the cubicle and my bump was so high I didn't even see his face as he silently examined my nether regions, muttered something like "satisfactory" and then left.

The point about the friend who was worried if she had asthma was that a chest x-ray won't show asthma, so it's an expensive waste of time as well as a dismissal ("if the x-ray is clear we won't call you back") all done by phone through reception staff.

Men do get dismissed too. My husband has been getting passed from pillar to post and dismissed for years over various health issues. My father too.

Unfortunately the approach of allopathic medicine combined with the huge bureaucracy of the NHS means that people are not seen as being whole, just a collection of different body parts - for which a different specialist is required. There is no joined up or holistic thinking; and communication in the NHS is appalling. There is no consistency between different departments, branches, clinics or specialisms.

Many GPs now seem unknowedgable and unqualified. They spend most of their time googling symptoms in the surgery - and if what you say cannot easily be allocated a precise cause or a reason identified you will be dismissed.

And there is so much evangelism about vaccines, nobody is allowed to question or present non complaint symptoms that have occured as a result.

@OverthinkersAnonymous I wonder if your mother's 'separate' concerns were all linked to the terminal secondary cancer? I'm very sorry either way.

How could anyone possibly know which concerns / issues are linked and which aren't? Someone might be experiencing issues with weight gain / difficulty losing weight but also maybe hair loss, brittle nails, heavy periods, brain fog, extreme tiredness. A separate appointment for each of these would be a huge waste of the person's time and NHS resources but would surely be much more likely to lead to the missing of the cause and therefore timely and effective treatment of the condition.

I think especially for women each of these could so easily be batted away by the doctor.

A separate point but look at how quickly the police announced that Nicola Bulley had issues with alcohol and perimenopause. Presumably neither tends to cause drowning but women are so often dismissed as hysterical, anxious, alcoholic....

‘Allopathic’ medicine? What’s that?

You should have lead with those examples then as they are female specific. Your opening post wasn't as those examples can be/have been suffered by men just as much. Ranting - venting - whatever. If you want a proper discussion then put up clearer examples of your complaints. Btw, I'm blunt, not unkind 🙃

Thanks @BiologicalRobot, I see your point better now.

Conventional, mainstream or Western medicine - and which tends to be drug focused.

All true.

I've been doing a little Google research and after looking at Descartes and the mind-body split (TL:DR) I came across this book review of "Unheard - the practice of medical silencing" by Rageshri Dhairyawan.

"All patients are silenced to some extent, but some — notably, people of Black, Asian, and minority ethnicity, women, and people who are sick or disabled — are more severely and consistently silenced than others. Rageshri Dhairyawan (a consultant physician) begins the book with a personal vignette: she was in hospital with an acute abdomen complicating infertility treatment, asking for painkillers and being stonewalled. The amount of analgesia prescribed and supplied seemed to be based on someone’s opinion of how much pain she ought to have been experiencing rather than on the amount she was experiencing. She felt confusion, shame, and despair."

https://bjgp.org/content/74/744/323

You can report vaccine reactions directly as a patient on the MHRA website. I did this when both DS and I reacted badly to the same COVID vaccine (same batch/session).

https://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk

ETA: I’m sorry to hear your mother was fobbed off and chances were missed to catch her cancer when it was still treatable. 💐

"Ranting on the wrong board" is very unkind. I'm not ranting, and this board is where I wanted to discuss the matter, as I made clear.

Agree - this seems to be a new trend on FWR.

All to easy to respond, assuming you have anything helpful to say, without being rude.

As you say, you chose to post on FWR. If those on FWR dont understand why someone might do that maybe they need to think why they are on FWR!

As sexism in health care and is well known, even by those in the NHS (think heart attacks as an overt one) its hard not to think that a useless response just feeds into an existing experience of sexism in treatment.

I have experienced this at my local surgery. I had booked a telephone consultation with one of the female GPs but was rung by one on the male GPs.

He ended up virtually shouting at me, made a wrong referal, which lead to a year's wasted time of both the NHS and mine. People go on about patients wasting NHS time, but the time I have "wasted" because of the NHS is exhausting.

But am loathe to complain as I think I am down as a frequent non essential caller.**

Ironically this is (and not to undermine the reality of sexism in health care) is that I spent years going back to local surgery about an ongoing complaint. And the reaction was always to explore what type of "female" complaint it might be. None found.

The years later as the result of a CT scan I was diagnosed with a health condition not normally associated with women.

A whole other and creeping worry is how ageist responses by NHS staff are.

**This is partly why I have concerned about everything being computerised. Once something is on the system that is wrong, you have no idea how hard it is to get it removed. And because it is on the computerised availalbe to all it shows up everytime.