as small as a world and as large as alone, Actually the reason that they are not going to do...

4:35pm September 24, 2014

Anonymous asked: Actually the reason that they are not going to do that surgery is because abdo wounds take a long time to heal even when you are considered normal within your BMI and height/weight ratio. When you are overweight/obese it can take up to a year -- maybe longer -- for a wound like that to heal + there is a higher risk of complication and infection. Automatically assuming that he told you "no" because you are fat is not only ignorant but inflammatory and attention seeking. Shame on you, seriously.

webmuskie:

Umm, wouldn’t that apply doubly to weight loss surgery, which doctors fall over each other suggesting that I get? Don’t you think irradiating the ovaries (not enough to treat a cancer but plenty enough to induce one) of a 57 year old (i.e., someone with a decent shot of being around 20 years later when the vultures of radiation come home to roost — or do you believe I don’t have much of a lifespan so its not important?) who is at risk of reproductive cancers due to too much radiation to begin with

You were not there. I was. I saw his bizarre obsession with my wheelchair and whether and how far I could walk. I heard him invoking my heart as the issue, while ignoring the plentiful evidence that my heart was in excellent condition. I heard him, shall we say, bending the truth when talking to me, then backtracking when he found out I actually *knew* he was wrong.

It’s funny. Study after study shows that doctors consistently discriminate against people with disabilities and fat people (and women, too, for that matter), and that this discrimination accounts for a significant part of the excess mortality among fat people. Yet amazingly, no doctor in particular has ever ever engaged in discrimination, at least according to people like you, whenever someone recognizes they’ve been discriminated against, and dares to say so. Its as if in order for people like you to acknowledge discrimination is occurring, the doctor needs to chart “I am a bigot and I hate this person”.

That’s not how bigotry works. It works by rationalizing, in each instance, why patient X should not have treatment Y. They don’t need it. Something that happened to them long ago under unusual circumstances contraindicates it. Some quality of patient X makes treatment Y more difficult. People like patient X are not likely to be compliant. People like patient X have a poor quality of life (which by the way is the classic phraseology doctors use when denying necessary care to the disabled, and which he of course invoked). Often the person engaged in bigotry doesn’t even consciously realize that’s what they are doing. They just subconsciously tick off all the boxes they need to deny care, and then they do so.

But if you break out of this trance, and look at the big picture, look at how collectively people with patient X’s traits always get less care than someone who does not, and how they have a higher mortality rate because of it, then you can see the picture. When you see that picture, you realize that it is more likely than not that I will be discriminated against in a medical setting. That’s just the statistics of it. Add his obsession with irrelevancies and dismissal of contrary evidence, and I’d be a damned fool (and probably a prematurely dead one) not to notice.

Wound healing might be a great excuse if what we were talking about was cosmetic surgery. Cancer treatment is not cosmetic surgery. There is no valid reason to think I’m better off having to wrestle for the rest of my life with the threat of endometrial cancer, all the while upping my chances for other, more dangerous forms of cancer.

I’ve heard the infection canard invoked more than once in order to deny care. My friend got it at the selfsame hospital when they were trying to convince her last year she would somehow be better off dead than with a feeding tube (because, yeah, disabled people are much healthier dead than dealing with the risk of infection, ya know). I got it from a doctor at that hospital who tried to shovel me out the door when I had an (iatrogenic) intestinal obstruction (interestingly, this doctor is using the malpractice of that surgical team as another excuse not to perform surgery. Both the hospital and the doctor threw the normal standards of care out the window (I was saved, basically, by the ER and my own PA-C, who were not so comfortable with jettisoning standards of care, and who managed to perform tests before the surgical team’s orders to cancel the tests came through). I made the mistake, afterwards, to try to work with Fletcher Allen to change policy, rather than to sue them. Had I known their own malpractice would be used against me later, in order to deny me cancer care, I would have sued their asses off.