if you’re not committed to antiracism, you’re not a good doctor.
I remember when I had pneumonia I was so sick and exhausted and in pain that I couldn’t get out of bed for *days* — I eventually pushed myself to walk across campus to the doctor’s office (it took me literally 45 minutes to walk there bc I had to walk so slow) and when I got there…the doctor made it seem I was only trying to get out of writing an exam lol. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I was going to be withdrawing from the class anyway bc I hadn’t had the energy to get to lectures at all that semester. She lectured me about how she sees students do this all the time and she can’t take a risk in trusting me when the only thing that was wrong with me was exhaustion. “We all have off days” is what she said lolol.
I was so humiliated at her insinuation that I eventually just nodded when she said it “didn’t seem like I had any issues” and went back home. It wasn’t until I fainted walking down the hallway like 4 feet outside my apartment that I started panicking and called someone to take me to the hospital. When I got there even the receptionists looked genuinely pale to see how hard it was for me to walk and how much it hurt to breathe or talk.
It would take *6* different antibiotics for the really advanced pneumonia to finally die out, the last of which was delivered intravenously in my arm for 10 continuous days — I still have the scar where the initial IV was and I have another mark on my wrist. I *literally* couldn’t walk or lay on my back for 8-9 weeks. I would sleep sitting up with pillows on a chair and when my breath would involuntarily deepen as I started to fall asleep I would jerk awake bc of the sharp pain my lung where the pneumonia was.
That same doctor who thought I was lying about being sick would then call me like 34 times in a row when my blood test results came to her office and the hospital sent her my chest x rays lolol, obviously worried about looking bad and having called me a liar and sending me home when I had such a serious bout of pneumonia.
In the 3rd year of my premed degree I would learn that doctors in North America — and specifically white women in nursing lol — often see south Asian women as malingerers who exaggerate their pain. In a UK study there were neonatal nurses who went so far as to say that south Asian women also lack maternal instincts, care more about their pain meds than their child and “can’t handle” child birth.
Yosif al Hasnawi — an Iraqi Canadian teen — died at the hands of two paramedics who did not believe he had been shot and claimed he was “acting” when he was actually internally bleeding. They made him walk to the ambulance with a bullet in his stomach, from which he would later die after not being transported to the hospital for 38 minutes.
Just yesterday My cousin, totally healthy, just died of a brain hemorrhage and often complained about ongoing migraines that could’ve been telltale signs of hypertension that were totally ignored by her doctor for years.
and just a day before that Kim porter who was otherwise healthy just died of pneumonia while having expressed her symptoms and pain to doctors for days — I would say that I’m shocked by this but the implications faced by brown people and racism in the healthcare system is 10x worse for black women who are often seen as liars and in it for the meds as a result of historical anti blackness and systemic rejection of black patients’ pain.
doctors are literally trained to perceive racialized people as malingerers who are trying to scam for meds or medical attention instead of people in pain. It’s 100% systemic and actually integrated into medical education.
So I recently got surgery two weeks ago and on the day of the surgery, they had me waiting in a cold room in just a gown because they had to do a pregnancy test. I had just gotten off my period literally two days ago and unless I was miraculously the next Virgin Mary, I’m 100% not pregnant. The nurse barely looks up from her charts to acknowledges this before insisting that I had to take another test. If I didn’t take another one, they would immediately cancel my surgery. It was hospital policy.
I’ve had this condition all my life but its gotten completely unbearable the past few years and I’ve been actively going to the doctors the last two years trying different methods to allievate my pain and this surgery was my last chance at any type of pain free life. It took 6 months to schedule and if I had to wait another second, I was going kill somebody. Safe to say I was a little pissed. I sat in that freezing room, irritated with an IV needle sticking in my hand, waiting on the nurse to find records of my pee test that I did less than a two week ago at their request. She couldn’t find the test results. She handed me an empty container with a cheery smile and an obnoxious prep talk that I did not ask for and told me to fill it.
One of the preparatory requirements they gave me was that the night before the surgery I couldn’t consume any foods or liquid (water especially). So I couldn’t pee. I asked for some water and she reluctantly gave me a cup with two sip fulls.
My surgery was scheduled for 9 A.M, they told me to come in at 7:30 A.M. It was already 11:41 A.M. when I had to retake the test and I didn’t go in until almost 1 P.M. The fact that I had to go through that extra hoop and have the threat of my surgery being cancelled hung over me like a noose just because of a pregnancy test is beyond aggravating. People love perpetually valuing the potential of a possible fetus over the lives of already living women. We always seem to come second no matter what.
That’s sounds extremely stressful. I’m sorry you had to go through that on top of everything else. We aren’t effing incubators!
This is so common amongst girls and women dealing with medical care
[Medical/Miscarriage TW] Earlier this year I went to the ER on a Monday night with terrible abdominal pain, cramps, throwing up, the whole shebang. They did an ultrasound but couldn’t see anything so they attributed it to a bad stomach bug, gave me IV fluids & anti-nausea meds, and sent me home Tuesday morning.
They didn’t want to do a CT scan, you see, because ‘We don’t want to irradiate your uterus unnecessarily.’ Here’s the thing. There was NO way I was pregnant AT ALL because I was literally still suffering & passing the remnants of a fucking spontaneous miscarriage. Not only that, I told them: the miscarriage was a surprise and an accident. I do not want children, had not been trying to have a baby, and had not known I was pregnant until it stopped (it was a weird year).
I was severely dehydrated and on morphine but I do remember telling them ‘I don’t care about my uterus, I’m not using it.’ But because of their concern for any future potential other fetuses, they didn’t do a CT scan. And 20 hours later I got to experience the worst pain of my life, my first CT scan, and my first surgery when my appendix stopped just being infected and decided to go ahead and burst.
I don’t usually add my own $0.02 to posts but misogyny in medicine needs to stop.
Yeah, this happened to me, too, about 17 years ago at University of Chicago Hospital after getting hit by a car.
I got kidney stones my first semester of undergrad and they wouldn’t give me the scan until I did the pregnancy test, but I couldn’t pee because dehydration and kidney stones. I was in pretty awful abdominal pain to the point where I couldn’t stand, sit, or lay down without pain. I told the doctors id never even had sex, that it felt like kidney stones, and they still insisted. My friend overheard them mocking me- obviously I was lying because I was a college freshman and all freshman girls had sex lmao. So hours and hours later and I finally get the ct scan and surprise! Its kidney stones. I was in an unnecessary amount of pain for hours because an imaginary fetus was more important than my actual immediate health.
weird how I became a much more compassionate and accepting person when I realised that drug addiction is the symptom of a problem and not the problem in itself
you also start to realise just how much the War On Drugs was actually a war against the poor, against survivors, against trans people, against sex workers, against the mentally ill and the disabled, against PoC, against queers, against the homeless. how much of it was a government manufactured ploy to sell violence against the marginalized as violence against addiction, as if addiction was not a symptom of systemic abuse.
a girl i know told me how a guy she knows once moved out from his parents, ate nothing but fries and meatballs for HALF A YEAR, and got scurvy. imagine the doctor’s face when this guy shows up with like his gums bleeding and the doc has to fucking say DUDE…. THATS SCURVY…. in this day and age
this is turning into a “how a person i know got scurvy” thread and im so here for this, please share your scurvy stories if you have any
the other day someone posted pics from the reddit page r/zerocarbs where these fools only ate meat and 0 vegetables or fruits and all the posts were about various symptoms of scurvy. i died when one literally read ‘i don’t want to start the vitamin C debate again but’
THE VITAMIN C DEBATE
My mother told me all about scurvy when I was five and trying to resist eating pumpkin and let me tell you it’s been 35 years and I still get nervous if I go for two days without eating a green vegetable.
I told my own little picky eater about scurvy, rickets etc and now one of her most frequently requested lunch items is baby spinach, closely followed by carrots.
I’m not saying everyone should mildly traumatize their children to make them understand that vegetables are vital to ongoing possession of your teeth and organs, but.. no, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Go for it.
some guys i used to know went on a boys only road trip. they decided they were only going to eat things they could cook on the engine block of the car.
two of them got scurvy. one of them drank so much jagermeister + red bull that he temporarily lost the ability to see in colour.
Blogging this tweet because this explains SO MUCH about the mindset of pretty much all the folks I’ve known who’re against single-payer, it’s not even funny…
This….
This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.
Because they’ve never known anything different. The idea that a broken arm is only a couple hundred bucks; a complicated birth a couple thousand; cancer treatment only tens of thousands; all easily covered by existing tax structures.
This explains a lot. And it’s a good example of what I was talking about in my post on scarcity being used to prop up ableism – always question the idea that a resource is genuinely scarce. Even if it seems obvious that it is, quite often that’s the result of careful manipulation and misconceptions that you’re not even aware of.
And never think you’re too smart to be fooled by that kind of thing, it doesn’t work like that. Similarly, don’t think people who are fooled by something are stupid. Nobody can have all the information about everything, and nobody has the time and energy to investigate and put together conscious conclusions about every piece of information they’re given. It doesn’t take being stupid, or even just gullible, to believe something like this.
I currently live in a country without free medical care and still, it’s enormously cheap compared to the USA. An American expat wrote a piece for our English language paper about how she paid more for parking at the hospital than giving birth to her baby that’s pretty interesting:
Yesterday I had to go to the hospital cause I injured my eye, I’m frankly dreading what the bill is going to be, but what made me balk was being told in the pharmacy that my insurance was denied for the antibiotic eye drops and it’d be over $100 out of pocket. So I didn’t get my eyedrops.
I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.
It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.
I’d honestly rather millions of drug addicts get safe opiates from doctors, than a single person with chronic pain go without because of the drug addiction fear mongering in the medical community.
It also decreases the spread of STDs, and so on. There’s endless benefits to it. But uh I guess keep fucking punishing disabled people and addicts because it makes yall feel morally superior or some shit–getting people killed for ideological purity.
Portugal legalized everything, with a couple caveats. If you’re found with (large amounts of, IIRC) drugs multiple times, you get a panel. The panel consists of a lawyer, a judge, and a doctor. Their job is to help you deal with addiction–not PUNISH YOU for having drugs, but help you overcome addiction.
The results? Oh baby, the results are fantastic. Portugal has far less addiction and fewer overdoses than basically anyone else. They’re treating drug problems as medical problems instead of crimes, and it’s absolutely working!
Oh, and America’s opiod crisis? Basically entirely the fault of drug corporations pushing high power painkillers on doctors/patients, including selling oxycontin with a 12 hour dose regimen when studies showed it really didn’t work that long, and refusing to adjust to the science.
And since, oops, it’s highly addictive, people end up getting cut off and then going for street opiods to deal. Instead of, y’know, being properly aided by medical professionals.
America insists on treating drug addiction as a moral failing instead of a medical condition, and it’s killing people.
And now a lot of doctors won’t prescribe them, which fucks over people like me who can’t function without the pain control they provide. And since the pharmacy companies charge an assbutt for oxycontin and for abuse-resistant things like Xtampza, insurance companies won’t pay for them.
a girl i know told me how a guy she knows once moved out from his parents, ate nothing but fries and meatballs for HALF A YEAR, and got scurvy. imagine the doctor’s face when this guy shows up with like his gums bleeding and the doc has to fucking say DUDE…. THATS SCURVY…. in this day and age
this is turning into a “how a person i know got scurvy” thread and im so here for this, please share your scurvy stories if you have any
the other day someone posted pics from the reddit page r/zerocarbs where these fools only ate meat and 0 vegetables or fruits and all the posts were about various symptoms of scurvy. i died when one literally read ‘i don’t want to start the vitamin C debate again but’
THE VITAMIN C DEBATE
My mother told me all about scurvy when I was five and trying to resist eating pumpkin and let me tell you it’s been 35 years and I still get nervous if I go for two days without eating a green vegetable.
I told my own little picky eater about scurvy, rickets etc and now one of her most frequently requested lunch items is baby spinach, closely followed by carrots.
I’m not saying everyone should mildly traumatize their children to make them understand that vegetables are vital to ongoing possession of your teeth and organs, but.. no, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Go for it.
aid crisis: happens exactly because of reagans administration
donald trump: *becomes president*
the usa:
to all the “we survived reagan we can survive this” folks … a lot of people didnt fucking survive reagan and donald trumps administration is currently on a murder rampage heres a modicum of proof
This week’s current issue in mental health: the price of medication. With numerous people sharing stories about how medication was the first step when they were getting help, we wanted to point out how the cost of these treatments is prohibitive especially for people without insurance.
Wait , over 500 dollars for propananolol?! I got that for free? What is wrong with your country?!
wupacing 