Florida’s Governor is discussing the difficulties women have in getting timely attention to their health care concerns, citing an example he knows very well.
During a CNN town hall hosted by Jake Tapper, Ron DeSantis discussed how hard it was for Casey DeSantis to get a mammogram when she suspected she had breast cancer.
On Tuesday night, DeSantis noted that if she hadn’t advocated for herself, she could have had a different outcome, rather than having been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 in time to get treatment.
“My wife, she just had a sense. She felt something, she went to see the doctor. The doctor cleared her and then she came back to me and she said, ‘You know, I don’t know.’”
“And I was like, ‘You’re fine’ because like for me, if a doctor told me I’m fine, I would never think twice,” DeSantis continued. “I’d be off to the races, I know, but she had a sense.”
“So she really fought for herself to be able to get a mammogram. And then when, then when she got it, it came back unfortunately with bad news but had she not been willing to do that, who knows what would have ended up happening?”
Casey DeSantis’ experience with doctors and their lack of attention to complaints from women unfortunately is all too common.
The Harvard Medical School notes that “women in pain are much more likely than men to receive prescriptions for sedatives, rather than pain medication, for their ailments. One study even showed women who received coronary bypass surgery were only half as likely to be prescribed painkillers, as compared to men who had undergone the same procedure.”
Women also “wait an average of 65 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain in the ER in the United States, while men wait only 49 minutes.”
Furthermore, the write-up notes that a “2000 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that women are seven times more likely than men to be misdiagnosed and discharged in the middle of having a heart attack.”
The Governor announced that Mrs. DeSantis was “cancer free” last year, a heartening declaration after months of uncertainty about her health.
The DeSantis family struggled with making her condition public, and Democratic critics played politics with some of the treatment period, including wondering why the Governor was out of the public eye late last year on at least one day he was with his wife. He spoke of that incident last year
“A lot of these people, some in the media, but a lot of these politicians who you know are trying to get some traction, they said, ‘Oh, he’s out vacationing’ and all this stuff. It turns out we were down in Tampa doing this treatment and it’s not easy to go through for her and it’s certainly not fun to watch somebody have to go through that, to watch your spouse go through that,” DeSantis said.
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