5:02pm July 26, 2013

➸ felis corvus: Not to be all morbid, but...

An older relative of my partner’s died this week. I think she was probably 90 or thereabouts (I don’t recall her exact age). So that’s why I’m thinking about this. Basically…sometimes I wonder, am I the only one who gets really irked when someone is described as having died “because they were just…

Totally agreed.

My mom is only in her sixties. And she sometimes has to go all the way to the Mayo clinic for surgeries or treatment. Because many of her local doctors basically just say “you’re dying, there’s no point in doing anything".

And she has basically the same types of symptoms I have in my thirties. Just each of us is more severe in some areas and less in others, compared to each other.

I mean both of us have gotten the “shut up and die" treatment. But I think some of hers is related to age, not just disability. Throw in poverty too for both of us, and it’s a mess.

I also ran across, totally by accident, a horrifying news clip. A surveillance camera caught a black woman with a (presumed) psychiatric disability, falling down and dying on the floor of a psychiatric emergency room while other patients and security guards did nothing. The security guard kept turning around to look at her, too. Like it was entertaining to watch this woman die alone on the floor. It made me want to vomit.

If people think that ageism, racism, ableism (including psychiatric and cognitive ableism), classism, basically every single ism out there, isn’t heavily involved in who gets medical care, who gets to live, who gets to die…they’re living in some kind of fantasy world.

I actually saw a doctor say that in hospitals, everyone of every demographic gets equal treatment. And I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I just…did he really believe that? ? ?

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