I found this rant in my notes from that time a couple months ago when the pharmacy lost my birth control prescription right before a holiday weekend and made me deal with unmedicated PMDD for a week and I was scared out of my mind. Have an angry rant about the inadequacies of the American healthcare system.

When Julian Bashir was a child, he thought that if he was bad, the doctors would make sure he got sick. He grew out of it. But… if you live with a chronic medical condition that requires medical attention to manage, this is kind of just how your life works.

You have to do all the right paperwork and go to all the right appointments and say the right things in order to maintain access to the treatment you need to be healthy. Especially if the meds you need are a controlled substance. You have to be the good patient. You have to, or you’re in for a significant amount of pain and suffering. It feels like a threat hanging over your head.

And sometimes, you’ll do everything right, and then something happens outside of your control to screw everything up. Maybe there’s a shortage of the medication you need. Maybe the pharmacy loses your prescription. But suddenly you don’t have what you need to be okay, and you hurt. More than that, you’re terrified. You don’t want to be in pain. You don’t want to suffer.

You just want to be okay; why is that so hard?

And the doctors don’t mean to hurt anyone! They don’t understand the amount of power they hold over us. They really do, for the most part, want to help. But the system is a mess of power imbalances and red tape and fear fear fear. There are too many bureaucratic road blocks that keep people from getting medical attention. There are too many doctors who don’t give a shit. Who don’t listen to their patients. Who assume the worst of us. We just don’t want to hurt anymore. We don’t mean to be a bother, we just want to be okay.

And we have to put our wellbeing in their hands. We have to hand them our lives and our sanity and hope they hold them gently. And if they don’t? We have to pick a new doctor and do it all over again. What other choice do we have?