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  • The Presence of Absence
  • Anonymous Two

It’s always disconcerting to say the least, to be confronted with one’s absence of medical information and lack of relationship with one’s family of origin and ancestors. I’m lucky in that neither of my two children (21 and 17, girl, boy) have no chronic medical issues, but what makes it even worse for my kids is that their father is also adopted, and is white, and U.S.-born, but he was in contact with his birth mother his whole life. She died a few years ago, more or less of alcoholism. So my children do have access to their paternal-maternal line, but not the other lines. Their father never found out who his father was.

I do have paper health records from Korea from about age nine months to thirteen months—which shots and so forth I received—and a couple general updates on my measurements and eating habits. There’s nothing about them that indicates that they’re inaccurate.

I wish that on health intake forms there was a box to check that said something like “adopted; does not have access to relatives’ medical information.” That would normalize our situation instead of rendering us literally invisible/non-existent in the medical lexicon. There should be additional boxes for those in foster care and other kinship arrangements that are common, but not acknowledged in any of these forms.

Medical intake should also ask about when we were adopted, when we arrived in the U.S., etc. etc. That could give intel to staff about how long we were outside of the U.S. medical system, and what our health context was before we arrived, etc. [End Page 127]

When I went to the hospital to deliver my first child in 1997, it made me realize in a new, embodied way, how alienated I felt from my own birth, because I did not have a relationship with my (Korean) mother and I had no stories about my conception, gestation period, birth, infancy, etc. I had already been thinking about this when I became pregnant, and my adoptive mother could not relate or offer any guidance, but being hooked up to monitors and having one’s body and its processes be the center of so much attention, was surreal.

I’ve never had a healthcare provider react to my not having family health history information in a negative or unkind way. I do almost always feel that I am apologizing for not having it, since it’s obviously something the clinic asks for and finds or pretends to find useful and important. I am not sure if having better access to family history would have helped my healthcare provider, because I haven’t faced any medical mysteries (yet) for my children or me. As I get older, it becomes more of a presence in my mind as more of my age peers are having medical issues. I don’t believe I have been subjected to any unnecessary testing or screening. I do feel that medical providers should have a better sense of what sorts of diseases and conditions are more prevalent in the Korean population and the Korean overseas population, and I’ve never had a medical staff person mention that they know anything about either of those, and in that sense I feel medically invisible, and have less confidence that I am getting the best care, or that American healthcare providers care much about immigrants’ particular health needs.

Footnotes

NIB policy allows authors to publish anonymously when stories considerably contribute to a symposium but contain highly sensitive information that cannot be de-identified. However, stories are never submitted or accepted anonymously and all authors sign our publication agreement, which upholds standards for responsible authorship.

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