Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • TIME

    Why my medical crisis wasn’t taken seriously

    by Tressie McMillan Cottom Feb 04, 2019 5 minutes

    THE FIRST DREAM FOR MY IMAGINED FUTURE SELF THAT I can recall starts with a sound. I was maybe 5 years old, and I wanted to click-clack. The click-clack of high heels on a shiny, hard floor. I have a briefcase. I am walking purposefully, click-clack-click-clack. That is the entire dream.

    I dreamed of being competent.

    I have never felt more incompetent than when I was pregnant. I was about four months along, extremely uncomfortable, and at work when I started bleeding. When you are a black woman, having a body is already complicated for workplace politics. Having a bleeding, distended body is especially egregious. I waited until I filed my copy, by deadline, before calling my husband to pick me up.

    That day I sat in the waiting room of my obstetrics office for 30 minutes, after calling ahead and reporting my condition when I arrived. After I had bled through the nice

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from TIME

    TIME6 min read
    Titans
    Last May, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about the profound consequences of loneliness and isolation—a departure from the type of standard medical conditions his predecessors prioritized. While traveling the country, Murthy had
    TIME1 min read
    Protests Spread
    Members of a student protest movement in support of Palestinian civilians link arms on Columbia University’s Manhattan campus on April 18. When the protesters, who called on Columbia to divest from companies that supply weapons to Israel, refused to
    TIME2 min read
    A Man In Full, Adapted And Redacted
    Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a massive book, in more ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publicatio

    Related Books & Audiobooks