Has anyone else found that the story of the mutilating gynecologist terrifies them beyond all proportion to the story? I am shocked by the vividness and durability of my reaction to it, given how inured I am to other news stories.
People in other threads commented that the article reads like a horror movie, and I think there’s good reason for that. This is the stuff of horror stories. And like horror stories, it functions by tapping into shared anxieties — in this case anxieties to which I think I am particularly vulnerable, as someone who has always been easily upset by things relating to health and medicine.
Still. I’m trying to remember the last time I felt haunted by a news story, to the extent that I felt nauseous and lines from it echoed in my head all day. I was pretty terrified by the anthrax scare right after 9/11 related to the reports of the “plume of white dust,” illogical as it was (I was close to the towers, and also 19 and stupid). It must have happened since then, but I can’t remember when.
I hate that my terror would no doubt satisfy the sociopathic gynecologist, but I’m not going to waste time berating myself for my visceral response.
No, you’re not the only one that ‘s totally freaked out by that story. Thinking about it makes me nauseous and panicky.
it gave me nightmares. and to think there are thousands and thousands of stories like that out there *shivers*
My horror grew and grew and THEN I watched part of the video. Meeting the brave victims… I am all fu’d up from this thing.
I dunno… something about that evil still takes THIS form. If he was just slicing people up regular… but THIS. He took pleasure in THIS.
No, not beyond all proportion to the story.
No degree of shock and horror would be beyond proportion to the story, because this guy was victimizing people for years in plain sight, so to speak. It is genuinely frightening.
My reaction, however, is to want to [heck, I’ll self-censor here and just say it’d be cruel, painful, and vindictive].
I have to admit that I read the headline and first few lines and then didn’t read the rest. Reading the details can be just as traumatizing to our brains as actually experiencing it. I already think in pictures, so I didn’t read, for my own good.
Yes, this has been haunting me all day, the awful fact that this man wasn’t noticed and banned from practice years and years earlier is so hard to digest. I’m glad I don’t have a gyne exam coming up soon, if I’d read this article before going in for the colposcopy I had in December I would have had a panic attack in the doctor’s office, I’m sure, and my gyne is fabulous. I’m sure my gynecologist would be incensed to hear of this story.
Could you provide a link to the story or some of the discussions? I have no idea what you are talking about.
Whoops! I finally scrolled down to the next post, and there’s the story. I’m an idiot!
Once I read a blog entry by a male obstetrician who was really making fun of his female patients and saying really insulting and mysogenistic things about them. That was nothing on the order of this, but it haunted me and haunted me for a long time. (IIRC, Twisty’s crew was on him so quickly and painfully that he ended up taking his site down.)
Anyway, I think one reason this kind of thing hits so close to home is that we all at some point in our lives have to turn our bodies and lives and trust over to people in the medical profession. And to think that when you are at your most vulnerable, someone could be hating you that much and you have no control over it, it is just traumatizing. It makes the very act of going to the doctor or having surgery feel like a violation. To know that there are people out there like this and you could unknowingly walk right into one is just horrifying.
I don’t think you are overreacting at all. I read your post but did not go on to read the rest because I just couldn’t. I was already traumatized enough.
Dunno if it would help, but if that gynecologist actually is a sociopath (he doesn’t sound like one from that article — sounds like a garden-variety misogynist who got the power to act on his hate), then your fear wouldn’t affect him one way or another. He wouldn’t be doing it to induce fear; he’d be doing it for his own obscure reasons that might make absolutely no sense to us.
Since the guy does however sound like just a woman-hater, then yes, your fear would give him satisfaction.
It’s why I tend to only choose female GYNs, myself. Call me paranoid, but I have to admit I suspect the motives of any male doctor who chooses to go into this field. It’s not the most lucrative of fields; the malpractice insurance alone is a nightmare for those who practice obstetrics. And even if their motives are positive, how much can they truly understand their patients? I tend not to assume that only black people can understand the black experience, only women can understand feminism… but these are social concepts. When it comes to the physical I’m pretty solidly gender biased. Only women can know what it feels like to have a cold-ass metal speculum shoved into her vagina, or get a Pap Smear, etc., so I trust them to try and do it less uncomfortably.
Not that you can’t get some batshit crazy female doctors, but hopefully their crazy won’t be directed at me.
Not so much *horror* in my reaction, as an overwhelming urge to clutch my bits and cry for a while, and then to exact revenge on Doctor Chops-A-Lot with some medical instruments of my own.
And reinforcement in my resolve to never, EVER go to a male gyno. My sentiments in that regard, rightly or no, are similar to Nora’s above.
I can think of a number of non-mutually exclusive reasons why this story would be particularly terrifying. However, it didn’t make me frightened so much as pissed off. How the hell did this man ever get through medical school without someone noticing that he was a lunatic? Didn’t anyone in the OR with him notice him taking more tissue than was by any stretch of the imagination necessary? Where are our mechanisms for getting people like this out of positions where they can do damage? Not to mention that just reading about it makes me feel dirty. How do people like that stand living with themselves?
the best antidote to a paralyzing fear is rage, fully and cleanly expressed, followed by action. one thing you could do whenever coming upon a story like this is send a check to a charity of your choice.
on that note, is there any organization you know of specifically fighting medical abuse of this kind we can send money to?
I should also note that one reason I am foaming at the mouth about this story is that I consider betraying someone who has come to you for help and has put themselves in your hands, trusting you to help them, to be one of the ultimate acts of evil.
I’ve been offline for a few days, so I just read this and it is the most visceral and terrifying thing I think I have ever heard of.
-E
You should probably also avoid the fictional works of Robin Cook, who seemed to have a think for mass murdering OB/GYNs. Mind you, I only read a bunch of his novels one summer in my teens, so I could be misremembering, but there seemed to be a disproportionate number of crazy gynecologists. Weird author.
(he doesn’t sound like one from that article — sounds like a garden-variety misogynist who got the power to act on his hate)
I don’t think he had the power, legally. The authorities said before that he shouldn’t practice medicine. I don’t understand why that didn’t end it; I can only assume he ignored the consequences entirely and the system didn’t know how to deal with psychotic behavior. I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this, but surely at some point now he’ll wind up in jail or an insane asylum.
I’m a psychiatric social worker, and he definitely doesn’t seem psychotic. His thoughts were clearly organized or he wouldn’t have been doing surgery so precisely. It’s possible that paranoia about women could influence him, but usually people with paranoia are pretty obvious to others and too afraid to function normally. I think the sociopath comment was right on, indifference does not seem to be at play.
We’re dealing with a psychopath here. Someone who loves to inflict pain or discomfort. Someone who is narcissistic and grandiose, and therefore takes incredible risks like cutting off a woman’s entire genital area in a room full of other professionals. Someone who cares only about his own well being and thinks of others as weak idiots who deserve what they get. Someone with no conscience and no remorse. Someone who, if he is not locked up, will simply strike again in one way or another. Hell, even if he is locked up he’ll just harm other prisoners given the opportunity.
Fearing psychopaths is wise, don’t mistrust your emotions.
They are uncommon, but not rare. They usually stay sub-criminal. Caution is warranted.
The story terrifies and angers me on so many levels. It’s the combination of the horror of the mutilation in question — I could learn to live without any other part of my body, but my genitalia is sacred! — and how vulnerable you are when under general anaesthetic — completely at the mercy of the surgeon.
But for me, the worst thing is proximity. One of my little girls was treated for an asthma attack at Pambula hospital, and another had a tick removed at Bega hospital, both places where this man worked. It’s just too close, even if he didn’t come anywhere near us.
As to how this psychopath had access to patients after being deregistered, it’s a combination of problems. In Australia, our country hospitals get much less funding than they need, and consequently the money is better in city hospitals. So country hospitals tend to be desperate. Bundaberg Hospital had a surgeon by the name of Jayant Patel, whose incompetence lead to the deaths of several people (Patel allegedly said at one stage that doctors were not dirty, so they didn’t need to ever was their hands before surgery). Then there is the story of the allegedly incompetent Canberra neurosurgeon. An occupational therapist noted that a greater proportion of his patients came from this fellow than other neurosurgeons. http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2007/s2013033.htm
Often in these cases, the theatre staff and other hospital employees are aware to some extent of what is going on, so maybe it would pay to ask around.
I don’t know – it horrified me, of course, but I’ve just been reading in Andrea Smith’s book Conquest and in the INCITE! collection about the systemic sterilization without consent that’s been practiced on women of colour for many years, and it’s making me feel much less comfy with medicine in general and OB/GYNs in particular. In other words: there are also systems that explicitly support doctors who do this to (some) women’s bodies, and I think we should be even more horrified about that.