chavisory:

goldenheartedrose:

prosthetical:

goldenheartedrose:

caseation:

jacquez45:

vassraptor:

violent-darts:

bravodelta9:

I always think it’s insane that Trump got elected until I read things like this. Like, how do these people slip though basic education, manage to survive the real world, and even procreate successfully?

I’m always super ambivalent about these stories, for a lot of reasons. Full disclosure: Mom’s a doctor. I am emphatically better educated about Medical Shit than the vast majority of people. Some people are really, really stupid, gods know, and so does the ER (just ask them how often they have to get things that should not be put up human anuses out of human anuses!) 

However. I also know – hilariously often from my mother, as well as my own experiences – that a lot of doctors are jerks, and even those who aren’t jerks are often fucking horrible at communication, which is pretty bad, because that’s part of their job. 

Further, things from these kinds of lists are often from encounters with:

1. Elderly people who are actually getting into cognitive difficulties, or who haven’t had ANY contact with the medical system in four decades until now suddenly They Have To Go To The Doctor, both of which mean that yeah: there’s shit they don’t know, or can’t understand without clear instructions 

2. Immigrants and English language learners for whom this shit is not common knowledge or who are struggling with the language 

3. People who are cognitively impaired

and finally, 

4. Doctors who are actually fucking terrible at communicating, are authoritarian domineering dicks, and should be ashamed of themselves. 

For instance, on this list:

– the guy with the allergy inhaler: if all you’ve been told is “I’m giving you this inhaler to treat your allergies with” and you have no experience with what “inhaler” means (which, AS SOMEONE WITH ASTHMA WHO HAS ONE, I can assure you that many many otherwise basically intelligent people do NOT), it is not actually unreasonable to assume that your supposed to apply it to the thing that’s causing the allergy (aka the pet). Prescribing an inhaler should in fact come along with a lesson on how to use the damn thing, either from the physician or from the pharmacist, and you should make sure the patient is aware that they need to know it. 

– okay so this is the big one: the guy with the daughter who aspirated food is a case where either huge detail has been left out of the story, or that doctor is actually culpably fucking negligent. MOST PEOPLE don’t know that the reason you don’t eat before surgery is because of the risk of aspirating food and dying; it is incumbent on MOST PHYSICIANS AND ANAESTHETISTS to fucking tell them and to make sure it’s understood. 

This is further exacerbated by the part where I know docs actually recommend fasts that are longer than necessary or that are completely unnecessary for non-surgical things like blood tests (NOT every blood-test needs a fast, and there is a HORRIBLE habit of demanding longer fasts than are needed, with the justification usually being “well people always knock two hours off the fast so I’ll solve this by adding two more hours” or whatever – NO. YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. MAKE THE GODDAMN EFFORT TO MAKE SURE YOUR PATIENT UNDERSTANDS WHY THEY ARE FASTING), which means that if you HAVEN’T had the aspiration/choking risk explained to you, what you are often presented with is being told that you have to deny your VERY HUNGRY, UPSET, CRYING THREE YEAR OLD DAUGHTER FOOD for no reason other than the (very possibly rude and condescending as fuck) Doctor Said So. 

Further, if it was not explained in detail that food in the stomach could cause aspiration that could cause death, then the doc was FURTHER NEGLIGENT because he or she did NOT sufficiently explain the entire procedure to have gotten informed consent to the surgery in the first place. Informed consent actually does require them to sit down and tell you all the things that could go Horribly Wrong. 

So unless the doc telling the story has just totally left out the part where he explained in detail and comprehensible language the REASON for the prohibition on eating (which doesn’t tend to get left out of the versions of stories where it’s actually happened, due to how it actually reinforces the OMG THESE PEOPLE), that one was the doctor’s fucking fault and I hope they are ashamed. 

(The first person who says “but a doctor would never do that” will be turned over to the segment of tumblr who has experienced Horrific Doctors, and will not be expected to survive.) 

–> that said, the woman faking the latex allergy makes me want to scream. Do not do this. Omg. And people DO. DON’T FAKE ALLERGIES. 

Also, in the story about the aspiration thing, apparently no one asked at intake,  “what time did she last eat or drink?” If they’d asked, that father might have lied OR he might have said “she said she was hungry so I gave her breakfast” and she wouldn’t have ended up in ICU. Given all the other red flags, it sounds like whoever did the intake exam didn’t ask, and that’s something I’d have thought normally gets asked multiple times to make sure since aspiration pneumonia is so serious and so preventable.

I think the one on that list that bothers me the most is the last one. The client left the hospital with their seriously ill child because of their reaction something the doctor said, something to which their response was “stop fucking patronising me and telling me how to raise my daughter just because you think you’re smarter than me.” As a result of this, the patient went into respiratory arrest. The doctor proceeds to… post about this on a Facebook thread about their “dumbest patients”. GEE I WONDER WHAT ABOUT YOUR INTERACTION WITH THIS PERSON MADE THEM THINK YOU’RE PATRONISING AND THINK YOU’RE SMARTER THAN THEM?

My older kid has had surgery twice, and both times like 85 people were VERY INTERESTED in if he had eaten and if so, when.

How crazy incompetent was that hospital? Because in order for that to happen at my local children’s hospital, I would have had to lie repeatedly about when and what my kid had eaten. They were not playing around. 

(That story in particular sounds kind of fake to me? Like, lots of details sound medically wrong, like the author wrote it to sound impressive? It’s setting off my bullcrap detector.)

Oh god, all of this. Also, my doctor who said that my two months of constant vomiting was a “psych problem” because i have bipolar can go to hell.

Oh this is where I should tell the story of being in the ER with my kid who had just seriously cut her hand, and I had some PA go “does she have any diseases?” and naturally, I go, no. Then he kept asking and rephrased the question several times. Finally he used the words “developmental impairment” and I figured out he was trying to ask about the fact she’s autistic.

And then he had the audacity to say that I was avoiding the question and I’m like, no sir, screw you, because autism isn’t a fucking DISEASE and relevance? Also dude if I had wanted to deal with even more bullshit I would have been like, fucking neurotypical asshats who can’t ask a straight question. I put on my southern charm and smiled and said, “you could have just asked if she was autistic. It’s not a dirty word.”

He didn’t like me much after that.

Rose, I love you. Also wtf does being autistic have to do with having a cut hand??

Apparently they didn’t like that she was quite a bit afraid of the needle with the painkiller in it.

Which Idk seems to be more of a kid thing than a non neurotypical thing but whatever.

It worked out in the end and that dude made himself scarce. But like, ugh.

So I had this thing happen once…and at the time I did not know what to make of it at all, but I wonder now and then…

One night in college (In Georgia, idk if that’s relevant), I wound up in the ER twice having scary cardiac symptoms.  (My heart was racing, my left arm had gone numb, my shoulder hurt like a bitch.  I knew it was unlikely I was actually having a heart attack, and I wasn’t, it turned out to be something that is relatively benign, but…scary.)

Anyway, one ER doctor at some point very abrasively asked me “Do you have any other conditions?” and I said no.  (I legitimately had no idea at the time I was autistic.)  He got more abrasive and goes “Are you sure?  You have no other conditions?”

Scared and in pain and confused, I was just like “No???  Can you be more specific???”

But he just dropped the question.

What was he trying to ask?  Was I pregnant, was I doing drugs, or did I have an eating disorder are all things that have crossed my mind, but I have no actual idea, because apparently it wasn’t important enough for him to just ask me outright.