By Angela Argyrou
It’s been two years and eight months since my life as I knew it changed, after I received my Covid19 Vaccination booster shot. Within hours I could barely stand up. I was dizzy and shaking, with a fever and chills. It felt like a brick wall was crushing my chest. It was a struggle to breathe. My heart rate jumped up to 140bpm with violent palpitations. The chest pain was so sharp, I thought it might be a heart attack. I was living on my own at the time and I was terrified I was going to die.
Cue multiple doctors appointments and hospital emergency department visits over the next few weeks, with a few ambulance rides thrown in for good measure.
I kept going back to the hospital, because the pain was getting worse and this is where the extreme gaslighting kicked in. “It’s just anxiety”, “There is nothing wrong with you”, “You’re stressing for nothing,” “Stop wasting our doctors time”, “You should try yoga”, “You need to see a psychiatrist!”, were just some of the things I was told, with an occasional condescending eye-roll from the medical staff.
Despite my pain levels increasing, my symptoms were continuously dismissed. I wasn’t being taken seriously and no one was listening. My boss asked if I was going to make it a habit of being sick like this all the time? Even some of my friends thought I was making it up, I was called a hypochondriac, an anti-vaxxer and even a conspiracy theorist.
Back at the hospital… “It’s just anxiety deary, this will calm you down”, said a nurse on one occasion, while she injected me with an anti-psychotic medication against my will.
The experience sadly echoes that of far too many women who have also been medically gaslit, turned away and told that their symptoms are simply stress or anxiety. It’s not ok, it’s medical misogyny and two out of three women say they’ve experienced it. How many other women in Australia are suffering needlessly, struggling with undiagnosed chronic conditions or tragically lose their lives due to the lack of proper medical attention?
In my situation as it turned out, it wasn’t anxiety and I could have died. I knew something was wrong and kept going back to the doctors no matter how stupid they made me feel each time. Besides the chest pain, it felt like my body was 100 years old. I got short of breath from the simplest things like taking a shower or doing a load of laundry. It felt like my heart was running a constant marathon and the fatigue became debilitating. I barely had the energy to get dressed some days.
But I had to find the strength. My gut told me to keep fighting for answers, and I’ve always been a little stubborn, so there was no way I was going to give up.
After nearly three months of hell, a female doctor finally took me seriously and listened to my chest with her stethoscope. “I can hear a pericardial rub,” she said nodding. I had no idea what she was talking about. “You have Pericarditis, it’s inflammation of the outside lining of your heart”. I burst into tears, not because I had just been told that something was wrong with my heart, but because of the validation and sheer relief that I wasn’t going mad, it wasn’t in my head and that someone believed me.
I was hospitalised and put on strong medications, but unfortunately this didn’t cure the condition. The vaccine’s spike protein kept retriggering the inflammation. I had developed an autoimmune inflammatory response. It’s like my entire body was under constant attack from an unknown enemy that no one knew how to go to war with.
I went from cardiologist to cardiologist, had so many X-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs and CT scans, I probably glow in the dark from all the radiation! Eventually, the doctors discovered I had suffered a second heart condition – Myocarditis, a potentially life-threatening inflammation of the inside muscle of my heart, which is now chronic and I live with every minute of every day.
Despite how awful this is, I consider myself lucky. Had I not listened to my body and kept rejecting the ‘anxiety card’ I was given, and kept pushing for the right tests and diagnosis, I could have had a heart attack and not been alive to share my story today.
Nearly three years in, I continue to battle the injury with trial medications and therapies, but gratefully, I now have some wonderful doctors on my team. Some days are a little better than others, and some days I just do the bare necessities to reserve enough mental, physical and emotional energy to get to the next day.
There is still a huge mountain in front of me to climb, but like every challenge in life, you have to stay positive, have courage and the belief that you can conquer it!
As women, we need to better trust our gut instincts. We need to listen to our bodies, speak up, speak louder, and advocate for one another. We need to push back against the medical gaslighting. It only becomes acceptable…if we let it be.
