flarechaser:

thecringeandwincefactory:

violetohara:

xmagnet-o:

dandridgegirl:

daughter-of-scheherazade:

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.

great-tweets:

“It’s my fucking highway.” – Dr. Judy Melinek, Forensic pathologist

bigmouthlass:

anotherdayforchaosfay:

thecringeandwincefactory:

meowren:

malchay:

So, I looked in the comments, expecting to see discourse or historical background etc, but I found none. Therefore, I decided to learn more and add background. Apparently this machine was used because of polio because polio paralyzes your lungs. According to the wiki article on this bad boy, patients would spend two weeks in there sometimes. They still have these machines, though much, much more modern but they’re barely used at all anymore: “In 1959, there were 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States, but by 2004 there were only 39. By 2014, there were only 10 people left with an iron lung.” (x)

I’ve read about one man who still lives in an iron lung. He taught himself how to breathe again by gulping down air, but it’s quite laborious because of the paralysis. His name is Paul Alexander, and he’s a lawyer. He’s 71 years old and has spent 65 years in an iron lung. Wild, right? He’s been working on a memoir that he was inspired to write by the recent resurgence of cases of polio caused by anti-vaccers.

Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4414081 (can’t hyperlink because I’m on mobile, apologies)

It’s amazing to me to recognize that we only defeated polio in this past century – that my mother’s father had it (he got lucky, it only deformed his feet and thereby kept him out of a couple wars); my mother got the big vaccination that left her upper arm scarred; and by the time I was vaccinated, polio basically didn’t exist. My grandfather must have been born like around 1900, so – in the space of less than 75 years, this was no longer something that parents dreaded the possibility of every summer.

Polio still thrives in a lot of countries, including India. I watched a documentary about it Netflix. The disease runs rampant in well-developed countries, and with more people traveling around the world there is more exposure to this and many other diseases. When polio survivors in India were interviewed and asked about the anti-vaccination movement in the USA they had this look of total disgust and shock. Idiot anti-vaxxers are placing a death sentence on their children, would rather they die or have permanent scars and disabilities, would rather listen to lies about vaccinations causing autism.

We had a big round of whooping cough tear through this tiny town I live in. Children DIED because they were too young for the vaccination. The people who caused this, the carriers, are anti-vaxxers. No idea what happened to them. One child died because the coughing broke a rib and damaged their lungs.

Some polio survivors have had to live in an iron lung their entire lives because the vaccination wasn’t readily available. Now the vaccine is and it’s fools and idiots sentencing the most vulnerable to a painful death because of ignorance.

Tangentally, if compulsory vaccination programs had continued to present day, measles would’ve been eradicated by now.

timetosavetheuniverse:

blueannawriting:

wlwsharoncarter:

wlwsharoncarter:

my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.

CRY ALL YOU FUCKING WANT YOUR TEARS DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME. YOUR TEARS MEAN DICK TO ME JUST SO YOU KNOW

Okay so not to be that person who adds on to a post with their own story but my mom is a doctor and when I was eleven she took me to these all-female seminar led by a woman who was the head of a hospital because my mom is an empowered and independent woman who wanted her daughter to be the same way and so there’s like thirty females surgeons in the room, all sitting around his huge circlular confrenece table and talking about their experiences in becoming surgeons

most of them were like “everyone told me I should become a nurse or a pediatrician” and “people assume that I don’t know what I’m doing” you know, your average sexist bs

one of the women’s last name was starboard (yeah I know great name) and she was talking about how even though now she was one of the most accomplished surgeons at the hospital, the male scrub techs (read: guys who didn’t go to fucking medical school) and some of the male doctors call her starbitch in the OR because they (scrub techs mostly, strangely enough) try to suggest different ways to care for the patient and she always tells them no ~~you didn’t go to med school and I did~~ and so they would go out of their way to get the male doctors to treat the patient differently and then she would have to argue with him to prove what she was doing es right but sometimes the male doctor would come and take over the case anyway and this went on for a while

but then the hospital statistics changed bc this woman was literally being prevented from treating her patients bc the men were interfering and so the administrative head heard about this (she was female) and she was like y’all better stop or y’all better start looking for new jobs and then starboard was allowed to work on her patients and got the scrub techs replaced and all of the sudden, the patients were suddenly doing much better during and after surgery.

when she told this story she was like “people still call me a bitch, and maybe I am because I won’t let them walk all over me, but when you’ve got something to do, when you’ve got a life to save, you have to ignore their bullshit so that you can save someone’s fuckin life. Sexism should never stop you from accomplishing that”

and little eleven-year-old me still remembers that bc I was insecure and awkward and here was this woman who just did what she had to do and ignored all the people trying to stop here and she really was better than all the male doctors (like her patient stats were better) and I thought I should share with you this inspiring woman with the cool last name

I’ve been deliberately requesting only female doctors throughout my entire transition cause I am not interested in death

talkingcinemalight:

bold-sartorial-statement:

appalachiananarchist:

dxmedstudent:

*raises hand*

Our attending walked into the room wearing her white coat, name badge on, and introduced herself as the doctor. The patient continued to refer to her as nurse the entire time we were there, and when we left, asked when the “real doctor” was coming. This same attending had to stop wearing her (very conservative, knee-length) dresses/skirts because male patients would comment on her legs or try to touch them. An ophthalmologist friend was telling me that she won’t do slit-lamp exams with the door shut anymore because male patients have (more than once) groped her.

Racism is still a big problem, too. I have another friend who, just yesterday, was told by a patient something along the lines of “it’s a good thing you aren’t a doctor (he is) because your people are coming here and taking up all the doctor jobs.” And that was definitely one of the milder things I’ve heard patients say about race. They’re usually screaming slurs.

I’ve introduced myself as a doctor, discussed treatment options, and when I left, I heard the patient complain that she hadn’t seen a doctor at all.

I’ve seen this from two perspectives now both on the floor and behind the scenes and I fucking hate it.

I’ve had more people than I can count call in to central billing to dispute their ER bills because the doctor that saw them was either a woman or a minority and, quote, “I never saw a doctor!”

“Sir/Ma’am it says right here you saw Dr. (Insert Name).”

“I mean a REAL doctor!”

“They are a real doctor. And you still have to pay this bill.”

They then usually ask to speak with a supervisor and get mad because all the supervisors are women.

yamino:

mamaduafe:

lagonegirl:

Green, who lost her parents young, was raised by her aunt and uncle. While still at school, her aunt died from cancer, and three months later her uncle was diagnosed with cancer, too. Green went on to earn her degree in physics at Alabama A&M University, being crowned Homecoming Queen while she was at it, before going on full scholarship to University of Alabama in Birmingham to earn her Masters and Ph.D. There Green would become the first to work out how to deliver nanoparticles into cancer cells exclusively, so that a laser could be used to remove them, and then successfully carry out her treatment on living animals.

source

her studies thus far are only on head and neck cancers, but her theory is this treatment platform would work on all types of cancers. But needs $$$$ to keep doing research.

It seems the issue is how to target the cancer cells and in her head and neck cancer tests, she had success in mice by utilizing fda approved immunotherepy antibodies to deliver nano particles to mark the tumor. Then she could proceed to blast the shit out of cancer with fuckin lasers.

she was ready or prepared when opportunity arose

I’m so proud of her. I wish more young black women would go into science.

#BLACKGIRLMAGIC

Yes!!!!! If she really does cure cancer, watch her name & face disappear behind some white man.

Don’t let it happen! She deserves all the credit.

Med students create app to connect LGBTQ patients with inclusive doctors

trikovaheda:

neutrois:

Three medical students at the University of Pennsylvania are getting ready launch their LGBTQ-focused health care app, SpectrumScores, by the end of August.

The app will connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer patients with doctors who have been recognized as LGBTQ-friendly by advocacy organizations, academic medical centers and, eventually, the app users themselves.

https://spectrumscores.kickoffpages.com

Here’s a link to their site.