I recently got a job as a receptionist at a family physicians’ practice. As such, we often see and hear things that are downright bizarre. This is such a tale.
At lunch today, I stumbled on a conversation some of the nurses were having about a patient. A 13-year-old girl had come in with the story that she had hurt herself while doing the splits and the wound wasn’t healing properly. Naturally, the doctor performed a gyn exam.
The patient had large clusters of genital warts all over her labia and the entrance of her vagina, some as big as a silver dollar. What. The. Fuck.
The patient at first denied any sexual activity, but then admitted having sex with a then-boyfriend two years ago. That means she had sex when she was eleven. Naturally the doctor suspected abuse, but the girl insisted that it was from her boyfriend.
And the whole time, the patient’s mother sat there calmly. They were given literature on genital warts and they left.
When I did my undergrad internship for my social work degree, one of my assignments was to go to the “alternative school” where the pregnant girls were sent until they had their babies. They would be in the A. S. until the quarter after they returned to school after having the baby. I went in all prepped with info about dealing with harassment (cos, ya know, everybody knows you been fuckin now!) About 3 minutes into my conversation with these girls - ranging in age from 17 to 11 - I realized these girls had been given absolutely no sex ed at all. One of the 14 year olds still thought that if you stole one of moms birth control pills after sex you wouldn’t get pregnant. The 11 year old - who had miscarried - still didn’t know how she got pregnant.
I scrapped my entire lecture plan, took the girls out on the grass for an “open air” lecture and distributed the name and number of the local health department.
Get enough people and there’s bound to be someone on the crap end of the bell curve. Still, why does the crap end have to be so freaking crappy?
Lament.
That is pretty disturbing. I hope the docs investigated the circumstances thoroughly. Sadly, just because it was her “boyfriend” doesn’t mean it wasn’t an abusive situation. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the ex-boyfriend is a lot older than her. I can’t imagine many 11 year old boys being that gung ho about pursuing sex already, much less being with more than one person. On the other hand, it does sadly seem quite prevalent for older men to prey on young girls and use them as sex toys.
I can’t even imagine wanting to be sexually active back at the age of 11…shudder.
Just clarifying - did she say she wanted to be on the pill because she was having/was going to have sex? I started on the pill - though not at 13 because my mother wouldn’t have let me regardless - to control extremely bad menstrual cramping.
Paediatric gynaecology is the single most depressing area of sexual and reproductive medicine, worse even than the oncology. These people deal with under-10s with STDs on a regular basis. If 1 in 6 girls is sexually abused, and 1 in 15 adults has some kind of STD, you can do the maths.
Isn’t the clinic obliged to advise Social Services if abuse took place? If she was 11, it’s abuse whichever way you cut it.
The hospital where I’m currently doing my microbiology internship processes several kinds of specimens for the nearby children’s hospital. One that came through last week was a positive GC culture (gonorrhea) for a seven-year-old girl. And they tell me it’s not all that uncommon at all.
A friend’s father, who’s a doctor, told me this one.
He had a 15-year-old girl with her two children come in to the clinic, scared that she was dying because she was bleeding from her vagina. Turns out she had never menstruated before.
Or maybe she was afraid that if she said anything, she would lose control of her emotions, and she preferred to deal with her daughter’s situation in private.
Sadly, many conservative christian groups are working hard to prevent the release of this vaccine, as they claim it will encourage young people to have sex.
