9:07pm October 21, 2014

100621041687

sennethbrassenthwaite replied to your post: “currently I am waiting for to hear back on disability to hear back…”:
whaaat a bunch of bullshit. I mean disability takes ages to deal with, but even just trying to see a fucking doctor should not take half a year. especially with…

I hate when the ER refuses treatment.

II have bronchiectasis because the ER refused treatment one too many times…

I…until part of my lung collapsed and then they went “oh”.

IAnd then it still took almost a year of testing to diagnose the bronchiectasis because they kept wanting to say it was just an asthma flare with an infection, even though it didn’t look like one.

ISome highlights;

IThem calling in a special nurse whose job it is to scream at patients at the top of his lungs to get out of the ER because the ER is for sick people and you’re not sick (even as you’re struggling to breathe).

IThe doctor who ripped the pulse oximeter off my finger because he didn’t want to have to record that my oxygen level was in the eighties. And I mean ripped it off my finger, with clear malice.

IMay be the same doctor who ripped a peak flow meter out of my hands, same reasoning. (Except that was more complicated because peak flow is supposed to be measured compared to your personal best, as a percentage. Not as an absolute number based on statistics for your age and sex. My best peak flow is 770. Which means that if I blow what’s normal for my age and sex, it’s an emergency. My brother has the same problem, with a highest peak flow in the 900s. So this guy was like “400 is a perfectly good peak flow” and yanked it out of my hands. I believe this was the very same day they eventually discovered the partially collapsed lung.)

II hate ERs. Like… I understand that there are some amazing people in them doing amazing work for very little reward, and I am well and truly grateful to those people. But there’s also all these doctors who are mostly trained in trauma, heart attack, and stroke, and nothing else exists. There are people who actually believe that people like us (with multiple medical issues that could easily kill us) are the problem because we “use so many resources” that apparently would be better used on people with conditions more straightforward and easy to recognize, treat, or at least institutionalize. And with people like that in there. Knowing that there are people who roll their eyes when they see me coming, even though they have incontrovertible proof that all my conditions are real so they can’t say “you’re not sick” anymore. They can still be nasty, they can still try to keep me from getting admitted, they can still do their level best to turf me to the street. And if I’m sick enough to go to the ER, I’m generally not up for a fight, so….. awful.

Notes: