Day: May 10, 2018

No, from tags here, I probably haven’t earned the title of Worst Healthcare Tourist Ever, as bad as I have been at accessing actual services.

That may well go to my partner, who has never registered with/seen a doctor or dentist in over 15 years in the UK 🙄

He did actually leave work early one time to go to a walk-in centre, for what turned out to be a weird infection in his elbow joint. That must really have been hurting. This is the same man who tried to convince himself that a cracked tooth must have magically healed itself, BTW.

But, that is his only interaction with the NHS in 15+ years of paying rather a lot of taxes. Bleeding the system dry even more than I have been doing!

(He has his own reasons there, yeah. And it worries me sometimes. At least there was that indication that he might get something checked out if he thinks it could be serious. But, there are reasons he can’t be as much help in medical settings as probably both of us would like.)

luckynicklausse:

captainsnoop:

i honestly dont know what i would do if healthcare was free here. i feel like i’d go to the hospital and they’d put me in the government funded sickness scanner and they’d be like “holy fuck dude, you got like, syndromes and shit. how are you even walking around right now” and i’d be like “i dunno, i didn’t wanna bother anybody about it” 

#then there are too many working for the #nhs#‘this isn’t america you know! we can’t treat every minor worry like a crisis!’#‘that’s not how things are done here! you don’t need an asthma inhaler what you really need is to lose large amounts of weight!’#and so on #wish i were exaggerating#probably different if they don’t want to discriminate #worst health in my life#and i had a tumor before

Re: clatterbane’s tag, ugh, I’m sorry to hear that. systematic fatphobia is dreadful and I feel like it’s not being treated like it even really… exists? People seem to either want to deflect to America, like “we don’t have the same level of obesity crisis they have :)” or they want to support gross campaigns like the Cancer Research UK one this spring.
Sorry this reply isn’t particularly constructive, just offering solidarity really.

Re: someone else’s tag about ‘how do they just test you for generally Being Sick?’, my friend and her mom were in a car accident and they were treated at an NHS hospital, and my friend told me that the staff had to run a screening on them as routine and that’s how they found out her mom was diabetic.
to my limited knowledge, screenings are p general but can give indications of warning signs to follow up on although following up can take months if it’s non-urgent / or sometimes even in some urgent cases it can take too long but afaik staff try to ensure you get treated in time / they’re overloaded atm though

Tbf, both those examples which popped into mind were from the same terrible GP. (The first one I registered with, because that was the only surgery I could find accepting new patients for our catchment area. No wonder that guy had room for more patients…)

When my parents were visiting, they ended up staying longer than intended and had to see him for blood pressure medication refills. Just in that type of first appointment, he was blatantly racist enough dealing with my mother that she jumped down his throat. Which he was obviously not expecting, and it was more gratifying to watch than it should have been. He laid off me after that with the really overt stuff, but yeah. Any excuse to brush people off. Not a good situation in general.

Thankfully, that guy was a bit of an outlier. But, as serious a problem as systemic fatphobia is dealing with the US system? I really have run into more problems with it here, for whatever reason(s). Even when my BMI has been in the officially “acceptable” range. That’s a new one.

As with about anything, results are probably going to be much better if you’re not working against various types of largely unexamined bias. And if you’re more familiar with how a system actually works on the ground. Theoretically universal coverage doesn’t necessarily mean that access to appropriate treatment is truly equal, unfortunately. There’s always room for improvement.

(Probably preaching to the choir here, but it’s still worth saying.)

bittersnurr:

kelpforestdwellers:

disgaybled-dionysus:

[ID: tweet by @/graphickat: “When people say “they never use disability as an excuse” it makes me furious.

Stating my reality is not an excuse. My body has physical limitations that aren’t negotiable.

When I tell you I can’t do something, it’s not an excuse. It’s not a matter of positivity. It’s truth.“ End ID.

still true with variable abilities. a healthy person knows they can probably run further on some days than others, depending on things like sleep, nutrition, stress, general health, etc.

so why is it so implausible that sometimes i can walk far enough that i don’t need an electric wheelchair, and sometimes i need it?

being able to walk for anything from 2-20 minutes per day produces a variety of different scenarios. drive me directly to a store and i won’t bring my chair. probably don’t need it for that length of time given the hassle involved. but if I have to get there myself and i can’t walk that distance, i need…….. a mode of transportation.

can everyone who is able to walk and has ever used a car maybe get off my fucking case?

The car this is really wild because in retrospect the fact I have never been really healthy enough to run around etc is PROBABLY a big factor in why I love cars. I also loved horseback riding and skiing. There is a trend here.

So I call the car the “big wheelchair”, the “friend wheelchair”, the “fast wheelchair” etc. Because that is what it is. A wheelchair that is bigger, faster, and can bring your friends with you.

I honestly think people get obnoxious about this shit because they are JEALOUS we get samll wheelchairs to drive around the store in, which they should be tbh because yes it is fun, but the solution is BUY YOUR OWN DAMN WHEELCHAIR ABLEDS AND MAKE EVERYTHING ACCESIBLE GOD

Source: disabled-dionysus

captainsnoop:

i honestly dont know what i would do if healthcare was free here. i feel like i’d go to the hospital and they’d put me in the government funded sickness scanner and they’d be like “holy fuck dude, you got like, syndromes and shit. how are you even walking around right now” and i’d be like “i dunno, i didn’t wanna bother anybody about it” 

heavyweightheart:

i’ll say again that the reason i have a veritable obsession w fatphobia is that people with eating disorders (the deadliest mental illnesses) cannot recover within a fatphobic framework. it doesn’t work. we must relinquish our attempts to control our weight entirely if we want to be free of the disorder. 

the clinicians, researchers, and health officials who fear fat and attempt to keep eating disorder sufferers weight suppressed – recovered, but not too much! – are killing us. if i hear about another friend who’s relapsed bc her team told her she was heavy enough now, i’m gonna lose my mind.

the fear of body fat has no place in this world and especially not in the treatment of people who already have a deadly fear of food and weight gain. clinicians cannot fear the same things as the eating disorder they’re supposed to be treating. if they do, and they shape their “treatment” around that, they should lose their licenses for so egregiously violating their professional commitment to first do no harm.

if you would rather see a client anorexic than fat, get the hell out of the field.

jenniferrpovey:

pom-seedss:

windiskywalker:

oldwordcubed:

jenniferrpovey:

See, here’s the problem:

Rich people don’t give money unless PR says they should.

Middle class people don’t give money because we live in constant terror of something happening to make us poor.

Poor people give money, but they don’t really have it to give.

And that’s why charity doesn’t do what it should for society.

Actually, rich people are very generous—to each other.

The second-richest nonprofit in the world is Harvard University, with an endowment of $36.4 BILLION. This year they got a donation of $400 million dollars, because rich people will throw gobs of money at organizations that cater to them.

So next time you hear a libertarian say that without welfare, charity will take care of people, punch them in the face.

^^^

This holds evidence, I think, that the lack of wealth distribution to those in need is driven more by a prevailing contempt for poor people rather than anything else.

More people need to look in to the history of charity and welfare and realize that the reason we have welfare is because private and religious charity was both not enough and severely abusive to those in the system.

I studied family law of North America and I am genuinely appalled that we are slwly going back to how things had been. It’s gross, our past is shrouded and few people seek it out and so injustices repeat.

Definitely. I want to copy some woodcuts/pictures of old Victorian workhouses and hand them out to these people.

bittersnurr:

kelpforestdwellers:

speaking of fury, why the fuck are we all sitting around making life shitty for everyone by playing stupid evil games about who is or isn’t Disabled Enough in any particular way for any particular accommodation or assistive tech when we could be….

…. using our unfathomable skills and technology to unlock everyone’s untapped human potential? to let us live the fullest lives we can, and achieve things our bodies and minds can’t do on their own, like we’ve been doing ever since somebody thought about giving this whole “tools” malarky a try.

even people who aren’t disabled, if they can remember the rest of us are also people.

we’ve created this mindset where there is some imaginary “normal” set of abilities against which some, like scientists or athletes, are seen to excel and others, like disabled people, fall short.

but i mean, what’s a normal amount of any skill? im better at Spanish than some people, who are better than me at math. which of us has the normal amount of ability in either field? next to a beginner, i might be excellent at Spanish but i often can’t say what i need to say. am i Spanish able, then, or Spanish disabled?

the question doesn’t make any fucking sense, right?

of course disabilities exist. you will not catch me flying the “differently abled” flag or any euphemism for it. the social model accounts for most of my misery but my illness still fucking sucks and would suck in an otherwise perfect world.

but it’s a matter of degree. there isn’t a magical line where Now You’re Disabled. you can start disabled or become clearly disabled suddenly, but not everyone does.

it took me years to claim that word. because of that, i spent years without even considering i could get a power wheelchair that would allow me to……… leave the house. i mean, im too sick to walk far enough to go out, but im not disabled.

i wasted years. i got dramatically sicker. i might have recovered if i hadn’t been too concerned with Not Being Disabled or appropriating anyone’s experiences to take the measures i needed. and every sick person i know has much the same story.

if we had lived in a culture that accepts everyone as they are but understands everyone, disabled or not, need tools to enhance certain abilities, we would have been able to think, “oh, i can’t walk as much as i need to. better find a solution to that.”

and abled people can make themselves laser eyes or whatever. and let me know when they’re ready.

I think @withasmoothroundstone had a post about hir father? At one point and how he had gotten his job when they didn’t require degrees and was very very good at it but if he had to get the job now he couldn’t because there was no way he could manage the degree.

I think that is the thing that fucks over disabled people the most in a lot of cases honestly.

Like I am aware I am not ACTUALLY useless. I have a handful of things I am like, way abnormally good at. But they are all stuff that is assigned minimal value in society I am considered useless.

The thing that kills me the most is that I will have Good Idea but most of the time it doesn’t matter because I am missing a skill to diy it and cannot get assistance for that. And SO MANY of the gaps did not exist until I was forced to try and be good at things I could never be good at. I lost skills from trying to get new ones. Big Regret man.