Medical Distrust

I have a friend who's pregnant and has some pretty severe anxiety around wanting to avoid a hospital birth and not trusting medical folks. She recognizes this and wants to work on changing it, so she asked me for some advice.

It's interesting because I felt the same way when I was pregnant. So much so that I wanted to write up a new advanced healthcare directive that listed T as the person responsible for my care, in the event that I couldn't make decisions on my own. I didn't want to put Louis down because I thought he'd be too much of a softy and just go along with whatever a doctor said. I knew T, on the other hand, wouldn't hesitate to call a doctor out and she would do everything in her power to follow my wishes. I didn't end up making a new form, but that's how strongly I distrusted any and all hospital peeps when it came time to give birth.

Anyway, one of the things I suggested to my friend was to write up her advanced health care directive, which she didn't already have. Since she's also very spiritual, I suggested talking with a spiritual healer about her fears and explore what they might be connected to. My friend did see a spiritual healer and told me the session was really helpful. The healer asked my friend to go back to a time when she may have been traumatized by something medically related. My friend remembered being just a few years old and having surgery to have a tube put in her ear because she had frequent ear infections. She remembered waking up from the surgery and discovering there wasn't a soul around her and she says she remembers completely freaking out.

How crazy is it that I have the same memory? As she was telling me her story, I immediately got a flashback to being in the hospital for my tube surgery and waking up to find a bloody IV catheter in my hand (and thinking/knowing somebody wasn't paying attention to me because it wasn't supposed to look like that) and nobody around me. I could see the bed and the machines and everything. It was awful and I was so young.

The healer my friend saw thought her scary surgery and feelings of abandonment might be related to why she's so distrustful now, especially when it comes to hospital staff taking care of her baby.

I know it's a little airy fairy for some, but I actually think there's something to that. I've had a severe needle phobia my entire life. Maybe it's all from the janky IV the incompetent nurse stuck in me when I was a kid. Huh.

Makes me wonder what kind of stuff Olivia will remember from her childhood and whether I've managed to scar her yet.