Sarah Silverman wants you all to speak out whenever something doesn't feel right, especially in medical situations, after she went through a horrible experience during a mammogram. Now, Sarah is no snowflake. A notorious potty mouth who makes jokes that'd make even the boldest of us blush, she's worked her way up in the male-dominated world of comedy for years. That takes a toughness. But that toughness was overshadowed, momentarily, when an ‘arrogant fuck’ of a doctor treated her in a way that bothered her.
Uploading a selfie of her chest (chelfie?) to Instagram, Sarah's caption explained that she ‘had a shitty time at my mammogram appt today’.
A mammogram - a breast scan to detect cancer - is something every woman aged 50-71 in the UK is invited to. Sarah is way younger than 50, but has one annually because, she joked ‘I have dense breasts (insert joke here)’
The radiologist who administered the procedure was the same guy who did it last year, but Sarah has now declared she will never let him do it again.
Firstly, she wrote, he ‘opened my gown and put gel on my breast and smeared it around with his bare hands.’
He then began talking to Sarah about her chest X-Ray, at which point Sarah ‘finally asked “Hey-can we either talk about this when I’m dressed or WHILE your [sic] doing the ultrasound? I’m not comfortable with my breasts out just shooting the shit with you”’
Though the doctor complied, he continued to smear the gel onto Sarah’s breasts with his bare hands, then ‘when he glides the ultrasound wand thing over my breasts he drags his fingers on them and it fucking bothers me.’
Just like she did last year, she told him ‘“Hey! Do you need to be touching me with your fingers?” He said “No” And he pulled them off of me. Then he added “I do that for balance.” I said “Well I believe in you and I think you can do with without your fingers on me.”’
While Sarah doubts the doctor’s intentions were sexual, she was bothered that he never seemed to consider her feelings during such an exposing procedure.
‘Look, I truly don’t think he was getting off on it,’ she wrote, ‘BUT it is his job to be aware that this is vulnerable for a woman. Wear fucking GLOVES - this isn’t a date.’
She then declared ‘This was my last mammogram with this dude. Or any dude.’ As an American with private healthcare, she is well within her rights to only ever ask for a female doctor, and under the UK’s Equality Act 2010, the same applies for you. That doesn’t guarantee that a woman doctor or nurse will be a saint, it’s just that, sometimes, women just get it.
Making a wider point about the ways in which women are made to feel uncomfortable about calling out a perceived abuse of power, she said that ‘arrogant fucks like this doctor take advantage of women’s socialized instinct to not speak up.’
The purpose of her post, she concluded was to encourage others to ‘speak up. Trust that thing in your gut that tells you this shit ain’t right.’
While this can be applied to all sorts of situations, the issue of women’s treatment by medical professionals is pretty huge right now. Last month, in Croatia, feminist campaigners spoke out about their experiences of being made to suffer needlessly during pregnancy and childbirth. There is a big conversation to be had, post-#MeToo, about how women’s pain and discomfort is treated by medical professionals around the world.