I Should Have Been Able to Trust My Doctor

As my older sister asked him into the apartment, I watched him from the other end of the hall. He took a moment to carefully wipe his shiny, black shoes over the tired, straw-coloured Welcome mat. He then took a step further into the narrow, dark hallway and headed cautiously towards where I was standing, never once taking his eyes off of me.

And all the while, I was aware my face matched his cautiousness with my own awkward and surprised expression. He seemed so old! Especially to a shy seventeen-year-old girl. I’d never seen him before; I usually saw a female doctor. But it seemed he’d been sent out to see me instead. I’d made a rash call an hour or so ago, complaining about my ongoing, but intermittent abdominal pain.

He asked without hesitation, in a quiet, detached voice, what was wrong. I explained to him where I had been feeling the pain only a little earlier that day. Guilty thoughts scattered through my mind as he listened to me with little bedside manner.

Was it honestly that bad now? Or had I been making it up?

Hysteria? Boredom? Attention?

None of those; a month or so later, I would get to spend a couple of nights in the hospital for a more thorough observation. But for now, I wasn’t aware of my body, and so with those few and far between little but sharp abdominal niggles would send me calling for medical assistance.

Somehow, I felt uncomfortable. A time waster. Bringing him all the way out of town, but to be honest, back then, in the mid to late 1980s, doctors did have somewhat more time to make home visits.

He asked that we have some privacy, and so I suggested the bedroom I had been sharing with my sister’s toddler, who was now in the front room with her parents.

The retirement-aged doctor asked me to lie on my bed. As he stood above me, I anticipated he would ask me to pull down my tracksuit’s elasticated waist to bare my stomach. You know, so that he would be able to palpate that area for any medical telltale signs.

But no, he didn’t ask that. He asked I remove everything below my waist, including my underwear. I couldn’t understand for the life of me why he needed me to remove my knickers. It seemed odd, but because I was a naïve teenager, and I was wasting his time after all, I’d better do as he says. And so, I obeyed his unconventional instructions, believing he was going to carry out an internal examination.

I flexed my knees and let my legs fall apart.

With sheer exposure and embarrassment, I watched his face turn and stare down at my intimate area, taking everything in. He looked far too long. At all the parts that the adult men who came to be in my life had joked about, sitting around me, openly gawping at porn films, regardless of my young age and inexperience. Objectifying and belittling women with too much humour and betrayal.

I looked up at the doctor’s silvery white hair, brushed meticulously over his scalp. I watched his eyes peer back at mine. They were cold. A callous blue. He hated me. That’s all I could see. He didn’t utter a word or initiate anything that was deemed medical to examine my pain, which was quietly simmering just inside my right hip.

It all felt wrong. I felt deeply vulnerable. Deeply embarrassed and deeply shamed. Discernment pierced through me, telling me this doesn’t feel right. I felt ridiculed. Just as those adult men had done to me. I was nothing. Nothing but an ugly piece of meat.

Finally, he told me to get dressed, that there was nothing to worry about. More than likely period pains.

I never saw him again. I never complained to the doctor’s surgery or even to my registered female doctor about him. It didn’t truly sink in properly for a long time that I had had a choice to speak up. Or that he had sexually exploited me, and that I had perhaps somehow unconsciously complied because I had innocently trusted him.

I hadn’t acknowledged any of this or that he was a sexual predator until much later in my life — at the same time I’d gained clarity of how I had unconsciously complied with other older men from my teenage years.

The ones that should have known better. The ones who sexually used me and abused me for their own gratification.

I kept quiet. I needed to fit in. I had to comply. I needed to survive.

This compliance wasn’t a conscious choice, but a response that had been shaped by my fear. By their manipulation appearing through being older or perhaps even wiser. And by my need to avoid conflict or harm. I didn’t know how to actively resist.

At times, I even appeared to cooperate. But my actions were always driven by my anxiety and confusion. A sense of obligation, rather than any true consent. My unconscious compliance had always been my survival mechanism, and never a choice, a desire or a reciprocal agreement.

Over the years, when reflecting on that afternoon, even now as I write this with great difficulty, I remember that forty-year-old memory with shame. Shame for not speaking out. Like all the other times. I never spoke out.

But had he done this to other patients? I’m certain of it. These predators are opportunists looking for their next trusting and gullible victim.

My gut had been right; he had, in fact, been sexually exploiting me. And if it were now in this present day, now I understand who I am, my worth and who gets to see me intimately on my conscious terms, I would have made a complaint without any hesitation.

As I began the process of putting a draft together for this piece, I contemplated contacting the surgery that’s still active in my hometown. I researched the doctors from that decade and read some articles. I wasn’t able to recall his name to make them aware, but I did realise he has more than likely passed on now.

But I am angry. I am angry at how the people whom we should be able to trust, professional people, doctors, can still move from patient to patient, being undetected sexual predators.

And this is why it’s so important to speak up when something happens to you. When you get that icky feeling telling you something doesn’t feel right. That something feels off. Your gut is screaming. You feel shamed. Because when it does that, it’s more than likely a warning for you to speak up and get the hell out of there.

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