9:18am April 1, 2013

➸ Yes, That Too: [medical discrimination, medical abuse, ableism] Ableism kills, and it is killing people right now.

adelenedawner:

sherlocksflataffect:

girljanitor:

wacky-shenanigans:

autiecommie:

girljanitor:

yesthattoo:

girljanitor:

User youneedacat is in the hospital right now waiting to undergo a lifesaving procedure. This morning, someone came to her room, woke her up and…

All right, followers. I generally make a point of not signal boosting for individuals, but this is Amanda, who was instrumental in my realization that I’m autistic and who I consider a personal friend, not to mention that she’s probably done more for the neurodiversity movement in the last decade than I’ll do in my whole life. The world needs to have Amanda in it, and I’ll personally be pretty darn distraught if it doesn’t.

She’s in the hospital right now, and they’re pulling shit that could fairly easily end with her dead if they keep it up. In the linked post, there’s a phone number that can be called to tell them to knock that off and get on with giving her the treatment she needs and has a right to. Unfortunately, I’m pretty useless with phones, to the point where it could easily do more harm than good for me to call at all, if they’re as ableist as their behavior suggests. But I bet that’s not true for most of you, so I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d call for me. Please?

Signal boosting and also noting that (despite my own bad-with-phones-ness) I did manage to call last time she was in. Talked to the nurse’s station or something like that. Mainly the sense of attitude I got was that they were trying to reassure me ‘oh don’t worry, she’s got backup here, everything is being taken care of’. When it was only really marginally being taken care of, if that.

I mean yeah she ultimately lived, and I don’t think “the hospital was actively trying to kill her”. But there’s this big…I don’t know. Like a wall of distortion that often seems to form between disabled people and people working in a medical setting, where you get this buildup of “someone else will deal with this”, “I don’t have time for this,” “this is inconvenient”, “I’ll check on that later”, “I tried everything I could think of to help and it didn’t work, so maybe things should just take their course now”. And so on.

And none of the little pieces that add up to the distortion-wall seem significant enough by themselves. But they accumulate into something that literally kills. They become a rejection of reality even as they claim to be an embracing of same. They convince people that “fighting for the right to die” is a Great Noble Endeavor, while those fighting instead for the right to LIVE get trampled. They define as “heroic” (read: ‘too much work’ and/or ‘selfish’) what would likely be merely basic medical care for people not otherwise disabled. And they define as “not worth living with” things that, when you get close enough to them to actually be in a position to consider the dichotomy of That Thing vs. Probably Certain Death…cease to be a big deal.

I’ve never needed a feeding tube myself. But, really, people. FEEDING TUBES ARE NOT A BIG DEAL. I mean yeah, they’re a biggER deal than a Band-Aid or even an IV, but this isn’t Star Trek medicine, people, it’s just medicine, of a type that’s been around a while. All a feeding tube does is get nutrients into someone’s body when said body can’t take them in the usual way. And don’t even get me started on it supposedly meaning something profoundly horrible if someone’s body needs assistance to do a particular thing, as if not being able to take food by mouth in survival-sustaining quantities makes you some sort of ghoul.

Technology, including medical technology that permits bodies to sustain life beyond what they would unassisted? IS A MAJOR PART OF WHAT HUMANS DO. And there is absolutely no way in hell I would ever consider it a bad thing for someone to live — even, gasp, for years — with a feeding tube in place, if that’s what they need to not die horribly of pneumonia or what-have-you. Good grief.