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Cis people on Reddit be like, "a trans woman would never need a gynaecologist, and they'd never ask if you might be pregnant because they could tell, and anyway, it will be in your notes, which they will have read".

And I'm like, "literally everything you just said is wrong"

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in reply to Sarah Brown

who are these weirdos who think medics read the damned notes. None of them know how healthcare works in reality.
in reply to NatalyaD

@NatalyaD
This. I'd been seeing my retina specialist* for over a year & he'd done 3 surgical procedures before a light dawns one day & he says "you're amblyopic! why didn't you mention this before?" (It was literally in my intake notes before the first [emergency] surgery.)
_
*I love the guy, don't get me wrong, I can see out of that eye thanks to him.
in reply to FeralRobots

@FeralRobots I had over 40 surgeries as a child. My mum's constant bugbear was not reading notes.

I think one sign of NHS issues is the notes-reading has deteriorated further. Even if I ask them too, sometimes just too busy and want to babble at me which as a deaf person is hard to process. Or you can see clinicians are info overloaded and can't retain info (which I don't blame clinicians for in a designed to fail system).

Self advocacy is a survival skill in healthcare!

in reply to NatalyaD

@NatalyaD
I'm super super lucky with my GP. She seems to have an eidetic memory or something; she will say things like "I wouldn't normally recommend X but given your history of Y and that you're taking Z, I think it's appropriate".

(this is not calling you a liar; I've had waaaay too much healthcare in my life, and the majority are definitely the sort you describe. And I guess GPs are a different kind of thing in terms of having a long-term relationship with their patients.)

in reply to Sarah Brown

it’s when the nurse says “ well, it’s better to just have the pregnancy test, just to be sure” that you know they are not really listening to what you’re saying
in reply to Rachel Lawson

@rachel I once said “well someone didn’t read my file”. She had a quick look and said “oh”! She then asked if she could read it for self education. I said yes.