Raquel You Are Not Eating Enough Analysis

Raquel you’re not eating enough, Raquel you’re too skinny, Raquel there’s something wrong with you! I would hear my melodramatic mother with her Sofia Vergara like accent tell me this everyday. Every day there would be something wrong with me and it always required a trip to the doctor. To make matters worse, my religious grandmother would instigate my mom's obsession of trying to cure me from my nonexistent illness. God knows I love them both, but they are the dynamic duo that made my childhood unpleasant. I remember visiting a clinic at least once every week to be treated for non-existent symptoms that my mother insisted I had. Every week I would visit my local clinic in Los Angeles, anxiously waiting for the nurses to call my name.
The long hours of waiting would drain and bore a little girl like me so I enjoyed listening to my grandma give uneducated health advice to other women. Grandma was a strong believer in home made remedies and prayer. Like the good christian she is, she took advantage of the clinic's waiting room to evangelize everyone that sat next to us. She would often tell the women “ God has the power to heal, just pray and I promise you won’t step foot in a clinic ever again!”. Listening to her say this made me furious because if God could heal through prayer then why was I in this clinic?. My
nine year old smart mouth would ask her this and she would always reply with “ God likes to test people's faith”. Interestingly enough, my grandma twisted the bible to support her erroneous beliefs without fail. The obsession with physicians began when my family and I immigrated to the U.S from Ecuador. When my mom became a single mother of two, the government was able to provide us with economic assistance and free health care. Now that I look back on my childhood I wonder why those physicians never tried to stop my mother from coming to see them every other week. They knew that every time we would visit, they would have to prescribe us with either pain killers, or recommend some gummy vitamins to satisfy my mom. And when pain killers and gummy vitamins weren’t enough, they moved on to all sorts of tests, my favorite one was taking blood tests. Like every other little girl I would often cry and beg for them to not poke me with needles. The needle poking occurred so often that I developed a condition where I pass out after every blood test still unto this day. I’m not scared anymore nor do I cry because big girls don’t cry, but subconsciously I have been traumatized. Now that I’m older I can’t help but think that they took advantage of my family's ignorance to fill their pockets. Which is why I can relate to Ambrose Beirce’s definition of prescription, “A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.” It’s only fair to blame the government as well, for enabling my mom to misuse her free health care, causing me to have a rather unhappy childhood. Every medical test result came back negative, which did not ease her worries about my health. A normal person would reflect and say, “Hey my child is healthy there’s nothing to worry about! ” Wrong, she instead shifted her focus to incorporate my mental health.
I am happy to inform you that I at least upgraded waiting rooms, I went from a cold dull clinic full of crying children to a nice warm room filled with a variety of toys and candy.
Instead of tests involving bodily fluids, I was now taking tests to measure my mental development. Every week I would go see my therapist who would ask me a series of questions and make me draw on a paper. I enjoyed it at first but after months of therapy sessions it began to drain me. It took a while for my therapist to realize that my mom was the one that had personal issues to work on, so she prescribed family therapy in order to help my mom understand herself
better. I was only twelve years old at the time and I knew more about psychology and medical terminology than any tween in the world. What helped me understand the world I lived in and the people I shared this world with was sympathizing with others. As a little girl I didn’t understand why my mother had an obsession to fix me when there was nothing wrong with me, but when you can sympathize and understand human thought and emotion, you can better understand why individuals are a certain way. Although my childhood wasn’t the best one, I developed an appreciation for psychology and medicine through my past experiences. Fortunately my trials and tribulations have made me a stronger and understanding person. My definition of Prescription is something that humans believe will solve their problems.