Photo credit: Advil Believe My Pain
Despite the medical advancements and resources available, the journey to motherhood is often marred by disproportionate challenges for Black women.
Deidra Rodriguez is all too familiar with these challenges.
On February 8, 2021, Rodriguez went to the hospital to give birth to her daughter. Approximately two hours after giving birth, she began to feel discomfort in her chest and pain in her head.
“I just didn’t feel normal. I felt like something was wrong so I expressed that to my nurse and she told me ‘Well you don’t have COVID so everything’s fine,’” Rodriguez recalls.
Rodriguez spent the next two days in the hospital thinking she may have come down with a cold until the pain progressed.
“I explained to her again – I said I’m having a lot of pain and discomfort. Even my mouth – my mouth hurts – it feels like my teeth are almost falling out,” Rodriguez adds. “Is there anything I can get for pain relief?”
Rodriguez was once again denied treatment and told that her pain was normal and would go away in a few days.
“I was discharged and when I got home, my symptoms progressed. It went from just having minor chest discomfort, to my jaw hurting, to my head having uncontrollable pounding,” Rodriguez shares. “I was getting night sweats. My arm started to feel numb. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was getting progressively worse.”
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Eight days later, she decided to call an ambulance. She told the doctors that she had just given birth and explained the pain she had been experiencing. The doctors decided to transport her to another facility where she once again explained her symptoms.
“He immediately ordered a blood test, ultrasound of my heart [and an] EKG and within an hour knew that I was having a heart attack,” she says. “That’s what was happening to me. That’s why I was in so much pain. So it took me eight days and leaving the actual facility to get help.”
Doctors went inside her heart and discovered that her artery was completely torn. She also had blood clots that needed to be removed. “I received five stents and a lifetime of medicine,” she shares.
Unfortunately, Rodriguez’s case isn’t an isolated event. According to a recent survey among 2,000 Americans, conducted by Advil in collaboration with the Morehouse School of Medicine, 83 percent of Black individuals have had a negative experience when seeking help managing pain.
This realization coupled with her own experience has led to Rodriguez’s work as an advocate for others experiencing pain inequity.
“My biggest thing for everyone is to advocate for yourself because you know your body. You know something is not right. When I went to the hospital, I didn’t display signs that… I was having a heart attack, but when I explained to him my symptoms and told him I was in pain, even though I was able to talk and didn’t look like anything might be going on, he took what I said and immediately reacted and we found the cause of what was going on,” Rodriguez says of the doctor who discovered that she was having a heart attack.
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“Even if you go to one facility and they’re telling you nothing is wrong and they dismiss you, go to another place – get a second opinion, get a third opinion,” she adds. “There’s a lot of people who don’t live to tell the tale or speak how I’m able to speak about it so you definitely have to push the issue…If I didn’t listen, I wouldn’t be here right now…I thought that I was in the best care because I was in the healthcare facility. You always think if something happens, the best place to be is the hospital. You think if something happens of course they won’t discharge me, but you can’t trust their judgment all the time. You have to trust your own judgment sometimes.”
Rodriguez believes that healthcare providers can improve their responsiveness to pain and Black maternal health by simply believing their patients when they say that they are in pain, even if they don’t visibly look like they are in pain.
“It definitely doesn’t hurt to check because had I been checked the first time, you would have seen the issue right away and it wouldn’t have progressed as far as it did,” the advocate shares.
Rodriguez has one simple hope for the future of Black maternal health and pain management: equity.
“My hope is that we receive the same care as everyone else – that’s really what my hope is – that we receive the same care…I definitely hope that it brings light to the situations that happen like my situation and thousands of other people. I hope that this brings light to it and that it doesn’t continue to occur,” she says.
Moving forward, Rodriguez hopes there will be more courses and training to educate doctors on how to handle these types of situations. She also hopes midwives will become more present throughout an expectant mother’s pregnancy journey.
“We should automatically have a midwife because a midwife basically follows you throughout your whole pregnancy and afterward. She definitely participates in your aftercare, checks in on you, and sees if things are going right,” Rodriguez notes. “If they’re not going right, they’re there to advocate for you. As much as you may be tempted to advocate for yourself…you may not understand what’s happening to you. I definitely feel like midwives definitely make the process a lot easier because they know when something is wrong and they’ll push for you.”
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