Sexism in Medicine - Women’s Healthcare Challenges
The best day of Starr Mirza’s life was the day she went into cardiac arrest. To understand why a then 23-year-old would be overjoyed at a life-threatening condition, one that would require a device to be implanted permanently in her chest, we have to start at the beginning of her medical history.
As a teenager growing up in Lake Los Angeles, a small town an hour outside of L.A., Mirza loved softball, even though she wasn’t any good. The running joke among her teammates was that she couldn’t make it from first base to second base without falling. “I don’t know why they kept me on the team,” she says. “I think it was more my spirit than my skill.” She didn’t know what was wrong with her body, only that she would frequently see stars, hear a ringing sound, feel tingly, and then pass out. When she was a preteen, she went to see a doctor. “I remember it like it was yesterday—I walked in, and right away, I got the eye-rolling,” Mirza recalls. “They asked me what I had eaten, if I had issues with my weight, if I had a problem with my brother getting better grades in school than I did. They were trying to say, ‘Look, she’s doing this for attention.’”