“This is a thing that’s changed the whole course of my life, and there’s people online saying, ‘Oh, well, you’re just being dramatic.’ I want people to realize the actual impact of trauma.”
Meet Ashley, a 19-year-old VCUG survivor from Ontario, Canada. An Unsilenced co-founder and aspiring psychiatrist, Ashley’s voice is a unique and powerful perspective of life after VCUG.
[4:25] For Ashley, the biggest impact in her adult life her long-term avoidance of medical care. “Going into medical settings is a continued challenge for me, and it never gets easier,” she explains. It’s just kind of something you have to do. But I still avoid it as much as I can.”
In childhood, she explains, her self-esteem took the worst hit. “With the self-hate that this procedure gives you…I never believed in myself,” she says. “I was suicidal and I was self-harming, all throughout that time in my life. Being a trauma survivor is very isolating as a kid.”
Although Ashley has only a brief memory of her VCUG at age 2. “To imagine it from a third perspective, like if I was a fly on the wall—it’s so…hard,” Ashley emphasizes, grasping for the right words to explain the immense emotion on her face.
Dissociative Amnesia After VCUG
[20:25] Like many other women, Ashley developed dissociative amnesia after her test, but the impact was just as great, pointing to the urgency of understanding trauma and how it can affect the human body.
[24:45] “Our nervous system is not any different from our other bodily systems,” Ashley points out, adding that it “isn’t any less real” than touching your own skin. “Your nervous system like the main computer in the body. And when that’s dysregulated, everything else is dysregulated.”
[25:00] When asked what changes she wants to see in the medical community, Ashley answers with a half-smile. “I mean, there’s a few things,” she admits with a laugh. “I really want trauma-informed care to be something that every single doctor practices. I want that to be in every medical school curriculum. The nervous system affects every other system, and you can’t just pretend it’s independent from everything in the body.”
When asked how she felt unearthing the infamous studies, including a well-researched 2014 study equating VCUG trauma to “a violent rape, especially in girls,” Ashley doesn't answer for awhile. Finally, she replies, “There’s no words. My heart stopped when you read that.”
Like many VCUG survivors, Ashley also exhibited symptoms of child sexual abuse (CSA) as a little girl. “It made sense because, being a kid, you have this procedure. And then you show all the signs of child sexual abuse,” she explains. “So I was like, ‘Okay, that’s why.’”
When it comes to the alleged lack of alternatives to VCUG, Ashley puts her impressive academic credentials to work, pointing out, “At this point, we can’t be doing this anymore. There are alternatives, and even if there wasn’t, they should be in development, because even if these tests were only performed when they were completely necessary, and even if they diagnose [VUR] perfectly, they are still causing trauma that is equivalent to sexual abuse.”
The decades-long failure to disclose all VCUG risks to parents is also a primary concern for Ashley and other VCUG survivors. “The effects of this procedure include becoming actively suicidal,” Ashley stresses, adding that the stigmatization of mental health in general detracts from the validity of psychiatry as a whole—the field Ashley is most passionate about and intends to contribute to in every way she can.
[25:30] “I really want doctors to recognize the power that they have in their patient-doctor interactions,” Ashley adds. “They know how to diagnose the conditions; they know how to treat the conditions. But only the patient knows best when it comes to their own health. Only the patient is the expert on their own mind and body, and everything concerning them.”
And that’s the thing about the VCUG test, Ashley explains—no one knew what was happening. “We didn’t know what was going on,” she says. “There was no aspect of patient understanding. There was no aspect of patient advocacy. We didn’t have a voice.”
Join the Unsilenced Movement
Get to know Ashley and the rest of our Unsilenced Community at www.unsilencedmovement.com, or watch Ashley's full interview below.
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