Editor’s Note: The following article contains depictions of sexual harassment.
“Ooh, that feels good. Keep doing that.”
I pulled my hands back as quickly as I could, fingers on a hot stove. The only sound in the sterile, cold exam room was that of my stool rolling away in protest as I stood up.
What I remember about the man who said these words was that he resembled a Colonel Sanders kind of man, or maybe a not-so-chubby Santa Claus. I remember him in a rust colored shirt. A big jolly smile and a wink let me know he meant his words as a compliment at best, a disgusting joke at worst. Just me and you, babe, here in the urology clinic for a postop inguinal hernia repair visit. I got you, little lady. I’ll teach you all about my undercarriage. Wink, wink and a raspy laugh.
I was a young, female medical student in a short white coat. Twenty-six years old, recently married, hair still brown and body still tight. I came out of the room and found the team, ready to discuss my findings. Incision clean/dry/intact and all that. Four weeks postop. No new concerns.
Did I laugh about his remark with the resident, the fellow, the attending physician? I can’t remember, but I’m sure I did. Laughing releases the tension of it, after all — just a joke, how gross, who does he think he is, and move on.
It’s been 25 years since that happened, and a lot has changed as a woman working in medicine. Not the gender pay gap, which according to the American Academy of Pediatrics study in December 2024 says I still take home a salary that is 93% of what a male pediatrician makes. Not the fact that people sometimes still assume I am a nurse. Or the rare comments I overhear about the good old days when the men worked as doctors and the wives stayed home.
But a lot has changed in 2025 as compared to 2000. In addition to the change of my hair from brown to white and my body from tight to a softer one, my spirit has changed, too. If someone said those words to me now — ooh, that feels good, keep doing that — I would not get up and walk out quietly. I would firmly let the grinning, winking Santa Claus know he cannot say those words to me, that he cannot talk to anyone that way, that he is fired from my clinic. I would tell him where he could go.
The good thing about being older is that you don’t care as much about what people think about you. A finely tuned self-confidence slow burns with age, and insults or rejections hurt less than they once did. Also, there is no room in my 51-year-old life for misogynistic or inappropriate comments.
I walked into that exam room with the naivety and trust of the small town preacher’s kid I was. I walked out with my back a bit straighter and with a deep, simmering rage fueled by this verbal violation, sprinkled with a dash of cynicism. Never again have I allowed someone to speak to me that way without barking back.
I want to believe things are better now. That when any patient behaves inappropriately to a member of the health care team — male or female — it will not be tolerated. I see in the younger physicians an intolerance for inappropriate behavior. I see in health care systems a place for anonymous reporting, for consequences. I have taught my own children about bodily autonomy and consent from a young age. I have discussed the same with 20-plus years worth of patients.
After that fateful day in the year 2000, I didn’t think much about my experience at the urology clinic in Dallas, Texas. But I know that experience is a core memory, because out of hundreds of patients I cared for in medical school, I can only strongly recall 10 to 20 patients well. The baby whose brain was full of pus from Haemophilus influenza meningitis. The young adult who learned that he had HIV and EBV-positive gastric lymphoma on the same day. The young woman with psychosis who told me that the government was trying to spy on her through telephone poles.
And the older man in the urology clinic who sneered at me and said: “Ooh, that feels good. Keep doing that.”
Dr. Julie Schlegel is a practicing pediatrician and mother of three who started writing a parenting blog in 2020.
Image by nadia_bormotovav / Getty Images
