Jelly and Ice Cream

I had food poisoning today. I had to go to hospital for treatment.
While I was there, the doctor asked me a strange question.
He said, "Ali, what did you have to eat on your 4th birthday?"
"Um, I can't remember that much about it. Birthday cake I suppose, and probably jelly and ice cream."
"Aaah," replied the doctor, knowingly. "That will be why you're throwing up today. I bet it was the birthday cake."
I was puzzled. "What do you mean?" I asked the doctor. "Surely it's more likely to be the raw pork and out-of-date vegetables I ate at that restaurant yesterday?"
"Hmm," said the doc, "I'm sure it's the birthday cake you had in 1984, let's forget about that pork for now shall we? Tell me more about the birthday cake."
"I don't really want to talk about the cake, if that's OK with you. I think we should probably think more about that raw pork floating around my system."
"No Ali, I need to know about the birthday cake." He started rattling off a list of queries, one after the other, without really giving me a chance to answer in between. "I want you to tell me in exact details, the colour, the size, the shape, exactly how much you ate, how much the rest of your family ate, the ingredients, the telephone number of the shop it was purchased from..."
"I'm sorry doctor, I don't want to talk about this. I don't really see how a birthday cake I had when I was 4 is relevant to the food poisoning I'm suffering with today."
The conversation continued like this, with the doctor harping on about the birthday cake despite me telling him about the raw meat and rotten veggies I'd eaten the previous day. I couldn't understand why he was so fixated on a bit of cake I'd eaten 27 years before, when I was there desperately trying to make him aware that I'd eaten much worse things recently and that was the cause of my symptoms.

Nah, I haven't had food poisoning. I don't eat pork, and if I did I'd make sure as hell it wasn't raw! I can't remember the cake I had on my 4th birthday, or whether we had jelly and ice cream.

But this is something else I find myself frequently having to deal with when I attend A&E for self-harm injuries. Only, instead of cake, it's child sexual abuse. Sometimes it's all they want to talk about. I could have been through the death of a close friend, had my flat broken into, got called a nutter in the street and lost all my hair in a freak rollerblading accident, yet for many healthcare staff the first question is always "were you abused?" Sometimes this is phrased as a statement, "So, tell me about this sexual abuse when you were a kid then." When I first started hearing that statement, I used to obediently give a brief history "person x abused me for y years" and offer no more details. Later, I used to question "who told you I was abused?" It was a genuine shock to me to discover that no, it wasn't done by digging up my psych records or secretly phoning my NOK and asking what the reason might be for my self-injury. Rather, it was a given, an assumption based on the fact that I was a female who cut herself. These days, now I understand how these conclusions are drawn, I actively try to ignore that line of questioning altogether. I have even denied abuse in the past, just because I don't want it to be the focus of my visit. 98 times out of 100, my history of abuse will have NO bearing whatsoever on the fact that I've injured myself. It's far more likely to be as a result of voices, extreme distress in certain areas, practical issues I have to deal with, not feeling able to cope with certain areas of my life. The sexual abuse I suffered as a kid pales into insignificance when you add in what has happened throughout the rest of my life, and indeed what else was happening to me at the time of the abuse. I'm not trying to say how shit my life is - I have a lot to be thankful for - but I'm trying to explain how little the abuse factors into my life and certainly how little it impacts on self-harm. However, trying to get docs to understand is like trying to explain nuclear plant safety to Homer Simpson (for non-Simpsons fans, that's kinda impossible).
I don't think anyone would argue how stupid it would be to question a food poisoning victim about something they ate 27 years ago. And I don't see how it's useful to continually press me for information about my life 27 years ago. Fair enough if long-ago stuff is the cause of someone's distress. But to assume that's the ONLY cause, excluding all other possibilities when the person tries to explain, is pointless, unnecessary, distressing, unhelpful, and a waste of everyone's time.