I feel like I am almost at the point of cancelling it, because it is for these varicose veins in my calf that have been there for years (ever since I had a kid) and not gotten much worse even though I’ve done years of powerlifting and jobs with a lot of sitting or standing. The only reason I now have the opportunity to get this fixed is because I have work related healthcare for the first time.

I have had such shitty experiences with healthcare professionals my entire life. Pregnancy was horrible due to treatment I got as a bigger woman, school nurses were horrible and when I had a mental health crisis as a young adult it got labelled as anxieyty and depression, neither of which I have in hindsight. I was still kept on benzos for two decades which I eventually stopped using by myself because they were just making me feel so much worse.

Typically I don’t ever go to a doctor unless I am very ill, which has been thankfully rarely. But when I do go, it has always just been more or less shitty and often dangerous. I had a big invasive surgery long ago that completely went to shit, because nobody believed me that something was wrong after it. When I had to go in the ER as I started peeing blood from covid, they tried to pin that on my weight as well. And asked me if I drink, I don’t drink at all. When I went in to show a lump in my armpit (that is still there btw.) the doctor said it was just fat without looking at it and started to talk about how I would be a perfect candidate for their bariatric surgery study because I am so fit and it would give them good results. I was powerlifting competetively at the time and honestly not that fat. I could go on and on with these stories.

So now, after covid and me having some longcovid stuff I am supposed to just enter this maskless hospital and trust these people with using laser in my veins and believe that I am going to be just fine after. I have a really hard time trusting medicine these days because of the dismissive attitude to covid and the fascistic attitudes many in the field seem to have. I also feel like nobody knows what’s going on in the bodies of people like me who have longcovid symptoms and a vein procedure feels very risky, because no risk is being acknowledged (if that makes sense). I feel like patients are just statistics to these people and it worries me.

There, I just had to get this out somewhere. I am going to go, I can rationalize it, but god damn I did not expect to be this nervous about it.