Ashley, 20, shares her truth: "The effects of [VCUG] include becoming actively suicidal"

Meet Ashley, a 20-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.
[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 really want-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...Even if these tests were only performed when completely necessary, they are still causing trauma equivalent to sexual abuse."

[@bejenaruandreea9845]

Such brave young women! To have the courage to speak up about the gruesome crime that was done to you, thank you for raising awareness. Hopefully we can end the gruesome treatment that children receive in paediatric medicine, these degrading medical procedures done in the intime zones of children should be criminalised!