#PatientsAreNotFaking when thinking about my experiences with medical doctors/the ER I compare the time I burned my arm so badly I needed to go in with the times I've gone for burst cysts and the differences were IMMENSE. When I burnt myself, I was treated like a human being

When they saw the skin sloughing off my arm, the extent of the damage, no one questioned me about addiction, about drug use. No doctor or nurse gave me A Look: one of irritation, or smug disbelief, or condescension.

I was treated like a human being,

That experience taught me your pain is only important if it's obvious, if it's visible, if it's simple to understand.

Your pain is only important if it doesn't require the people treating you to trust you

Your pain is only important and YOU, as a patient, are only important if what happened to you carries no potential for negative moral judgment. Even though I burnt myself in the most ridiculous way possible, being burnt bears a positive moral association as "an accident"

"Accidents" are ok
Illness though? Illness is a negative thing, illness is a reflection on a person's moral worth, illness means a person has not only done something "wrong" but has lived in such a way that "wrongness" becomes physically coded into their body

And this goes back to that Puritan/predestination/Protestant Work Ethic capitalist orthodoxy that's the true founding value of the US--that bad things only happen to bad people, that disease is a way for God to expose the unworthy, that if someone is sick they did something wrong

And if you're sick and a black person? a POC? an Indigenous person? poor? fat? a woman? visibly queer? not conventionally attractive?

Well then multiply that disease = god hates you belief system by like infinity.

Me burning myself was not a reflection on my entire existence. The doctor/nurses saw it as a thing that can happen to anybody and I was given pain medication with a second thought.

Me coming in with severe pelvic pain for no discernible reason? Welp. The complete opposite

So when you read through the #PatientsAreNotFaking hashtag, think about how you react when you hear about someone getting hurt v. someone struggling with a chronic illness. Examine your own biases. Figure out why you feel one way about accidents & another about illness

Because if we're gonna start taking sick people seriously we gotta realize we hold these biases in the first place

Oh & when I burnt myself? I told them I didn't WANT pain medication. I can't take opioids or anything with acetaminophen b/c I'm super sensitive to them and they make me so sick I usually would rather deal with the pain. I can take NSAIDS & that's it & I was trying to tell the dr

Please just to give me some extra strength Motrin or something and he gave me a gentle smile, handed me a bottle of percocets and said "don't punish yourself. Take this. You need it. You don't have to be strong."

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