When my mother was pregnant with me, her doctor was really off put by the number of heartbeats that he was picking up. While it seemed to him that there were occasionally another heartbeat, he eventually dismissed it as a strange echo and didn’t take too much concern when I came out with an irregular heartbeat. I was hooked up to a heart monitor, wires, and spent a few weeks in the hospital before the doctors decided that whatever was wrong with my irregular heart beat was not a life or death situation and baby Kirstin was able to be taken home. I was plagued with chest pain, anxiety, hypoglycemia, hypothyroidism and many other uncomfortable symptoms, but I was alive and moving and that was all that mattered.
When I turned 10 and started my first period, my heart problem really took off. Besides being a super early bloomer, my heart would speed up or slow down at random increments. Whenever I tried to tell doctors that something was seriously wrong, they told me that it was all in my head – girls get light headed when they’re on their period all the time, I shouldn’t make such a big deal about it. I was always sent home without even a doctors note dismissing me from school.
By the time that I was 15, constantly passing out in class was becoming a problem. I would lose consciousness in the middle of tests, lunch lines, even during swim practice. I went to doctor after doctor begging for relief from the headaches, nausea, irregular body temperature and especially the losing consciousness. Every symptom I had was dismissed as a sign of PMS – a condition I was told would happen the week before my period, the week of my period, the week after my period, and then the week of ovulation. That’s right – I was told that my period was making my heart stop and that I should just get over it and drink more water.
What was really happening, though, was that my nervous system was constantly battling with my heart, trying to get it to come to a complete stop. Every time I was going unconscious, I was flat lining. And it took almost 20 years for someone to listen to me and to witness an, at that time daily, “episode” of passing out and flat lining before my voice was heard.
My story is not abnormal. Girls everywhere are being dismissed by medical professionals. I encourage other girls to tell their stories about their health concerns going unheard because of your gender. Gender discrimination in the medical field is real and common and we have to put an end to the idea that women’s opinions are less important than a man’s.
We know our bodies better than any medical professional. We are the ones that have to live (or die) with our health. We have to start listening and trusting our bodies, even when everyone tells us we’re making it up.
