One thing that drives me mad is whenever I need an x-ray, including mammograms at times, or when I’ve needed ops, medical professionals, quite properly ask “is there any possibility you could be pregnant?” It’s not that which drives me mad, but their response to my emphatic “no!” If I can’t remember the date of my last period (common), my repeated responses that there’s still no way it’s possible, is met by an insistence that they’ll have to do a pregnancy test. Even after spelling it out to them, they’ve still been known to insist on a pregnancy test. Last time I had an op I refused point blank (it seems a total waste of scarce NHS resources doing pregnancy tests on patients who cannot possibly be pregnant), so on the bottom of the consent form in large capital letters (in red ink) someone scrawled “patient refused pregnancy test”. The first question the anaesthetist asked when I saw him before the op was why I’d refused a pregnancy test, meaning I had to out myself twice in one day to medical staff. The fact that it was a waste of resources to do a test seemed to be beyond their comprehension. My mum too had a similar experience, only in her case no-one had thought to check back in her records. If they had done they’d have realised she’d had a hysterectomy three years previously!
Has anyone else encountered this sort of thing?