Writing

In 2025 I published my first chapbook Patient is a Young Woman, a collection of poems that represent first-hand encounters with the "white coat man", an allegory for bias in the treatment of women and minorities within healthcare, often resulting in medical gaslighting. Excerpts below.

Patient is a young woman

Is the reason you act so cold as a practitioner a failed attempt to adapt
to this clean environment around you?
Have you become as sterile

as the conditions in this room?

Have you forgotten how to treat a patient as yourself?
Here I sit
below you

a young woman,
I am nothing but
a young woman
and because I am so,
I could not have anything else that could cause my pain except for my womanhood.

If I am lucky enough for you to issue testing, you ask me if I am pregnant

twice.

Better not hurt the baby
that isn’t there
than to take the woman in front of me seriously.

If the test comes back fine,
you are fine.
Why are you here?
I won’t be needing to see you anymore.

Maybe if you go and have a baby you’ll feel better
and leave me alone.

Core values

kerngesund

my label from the white coat man
a German term directly translated as core-healthy
meaning: in perfect health

Doc,
the core inside of me is that of a rotten apple - from the outside, I shine beautifully
look into me and you will find a moldy meadow.

Once I encountered a white coat man that took my crumbling spine seriously only to find out he was worried
that because of it,

I would become ugly.

Another time I was referred to physical therapy
not because it was deemed necessary
but because the doctor looked at my sides and sighed, “my friend is a physical therapist
and is painfully single”.

How have I, the sick woman, become the treatment for the healthy man?

What will happen when I turn older
and lose my beauty?
Will they listen to me?
Or will it then be a new layer of ignorance, will I be too ugly

and therefore too sick to be taken seriously?

Key notes

Key notes
the longer the dial notes the louder the sound seeping and repeating

seconds, minutes,

a person will be with you shortly

hours

20 minutes in
I put the phone on speaker
has this become a background track to my life?

My fourth attempt today my ninth this week,
to make an appointment unattainable any time soon a slot too short until it’s

too late.

I try to plead my urgency
in my receiver a secretary meets me with discrepancy and connects me to another secretary
who gently does her best to break up with me

the further I dial
the more desperate I feel begging to see someone
who will help me
and ten months later will ask me why didn’t i call in sooner?