Read on Twitter
going home & having a name for what i saw has me ready to finally talk about all the different ways gross negligence and many -isms in the US medical system has tried to kill me and everyone i care about. tw bc it’s all sad + a lot but read if you can, these stories are important
i wasn’t breathing for a minute after i was born (via emergency C-section 24 days early) but they’d already lost my heartbeat for 5 minutes before my moms doctor (a BW) came in. other staff were “waiting it out longer.” she told them i needed to come out immediately
my lungs are still fucked up and my asthmatic-self faithfully got pneumonia every year from 1st grade to 5th grade bc they just.... cannot. side note: i didn’t know pneumonia wasn’t a regular occurrence til college lmao
the first time i had it the doctors spent days getting me ready to remove part of my stomach bc i had a tumor, turns out my lung was so swollen it was pushing down on the rest of my internal organs
every year my mom took me in the early stages of it to get it checked out, every year i was sent home, every year i ended up having to be hospitalized bc it got too bad to be dealt with in any other way
that first pneumonia did bring my one of my fondest memories: my first grade teacher called me during spring break from paris while i was in the hospital. he was a first year teacher when he had us so we were particularly special to him (tho he’s a spectacular man/person anyway).
do i think how the other docs handled the situation was motivated by how deeply they advised my mom to abort me bc they were certain i would be genetically-mutated and suffer from severe brain defects and their false confidence in themselves and their prognosis? absolutely
when i was in 3rd grade my mom went to the hospital bc something was wrong with her a chest and she was scared. by this point she’d been a nurse for years and just knew her body but they sent her home with advil. later that night my pops woke her up and made her go back
turns out she had a 98% blockage in the left side of her heart and had stints put it. if she wouldn’t have gone back she would have died in her sleep. i know this bc doc didn’t think to remove me from the room when they told my dad / put the xrays up even tho i had family outside
twelve years later my mom went to the hospital every few days for a while bc she had a migraine. they sent her home with some otc meds. she has poorly treated chronic migraines (which is yet another problem) so she knew this was different. they refused to do a CT scan.
a few days after her last trip to the hospital she was driving my siblings home from the store when half her vision cut out. turns out the migraine was a stroke and it could’ve been stopped if detected earlier.
she’s since lost most her peripheral vision and suffers from other visual problems. her sight will never come back. she had to quit nursing and the disability office fought us for over a year so we were without income. we’ve never financially recovered. we probably never will.
she gets a disability check now but it’s only like 60% of her pre-stroke income and if she brings in any income over like $1,300 a month, they’ll take it. $1,300 a month.
but more than that, my mom’s life was being a nurse and being our mom and she simultaneously felt like she lost her ability to do both when she could no longer provide for us. she still hasn’t worked through that, but she’s healing. she never should’ve had to.
2016 went to the eye doc & had to get same day surgery for retinal tears but they didn’t tell us insurance didn’t process til after so we got a bill for thousands for a surgery i would’ve likely lost vision w/o but would’ve denied had i known insurance wouldn’t cover it
in 2nd grade i watched my sister (she was like 2-3) play on my moms lap, she leaned back to look at me upside down and as she did she abruptly stopped laughing and her eyes rolled back in her head. her blood sugar had dropped dangerously low.
by the grace of god my mom was able to figure that out immediately, but only bc she has type 1 diabetes and had been asking doctors to test our A1C for years but it was “just fine.” my sister & i both ‘suprisingly’ found out we have it in our teens. my grandma also has it lmao
personal fav wtf was going o story is when i woke up one day with a high ass fever and couldn’t see / talk and i was out of town. my friend was with me luckily but i was supposed to drive to springfield (she did not do highway driving) but she got us home.
i was locked in my house for a few days miserable then it just... went away. my mom and moni thought i was going to die but even still idk what that was but it’s “unlikely to reoccur so i shouldn’t worry.” i have a strong and supported hypothesis tho. it’s grim.
back to things my mother and grandmother both had: strokes in 2017. a year before huhs put me on hormonal birth control despite me explicitly telling them how high risk i was for blood clots. guess what i got in october of this year.
anyway over break i took my sis to an appt, the doctor came back and was giving info about when to take it and stuff, when he stopped and said “wait you don’t have asthma do you?” she does. we all do. he didn’t even check her chart before writing a prescription.
i don’t really have anything to contribute here in terms of commentary bc i’m exhausted and this is exhausting but being in the room with my sister and actually understanding why shit like that—gross negligence—happens made all this shit come back to me
people i love and care about are here by luck and self-preservation only. no system or institution has ever stepped in to help us in a way we didn’t have to force it to. many of them actively disregarded our concerns to the point where if we didn’t trust ourselves we’d be dead.
one note tho: everybody but especially poor Black women—if you ask a doctor for anything (e.g. meds, a CT scan, an exam, etc) and they say no ask them to note the denial in your charts/records and keep a personal record for yourself. it’s helped get my fam the help we need.
that’s why that video of that person that was like “we know when y’all are faking it” is not funny. bc y’all really fucking don’t and people die bc of it. and also if you don’t believe healthcare is a right, fuck you personally. that’s all for now folks. keep fighting on.
