holly gayle

Hozier witches: moss terrariums, broken guitar strings, faerie circles, tiny jar necklaces on hemp yarn

Rihanna witches: crystal balls, knuckle bone runes, lotus tattoos, poppets, carnelian carvings, shapes grown in trees

Fleetwood Mac witches: rat skulls, grave dirt, wormwood, broomsticks, cobwebs in corners, centuries-old walnut floors

Loreena McKennitt witches: fresh bread, bare feet, penny whistles, pendulums, stacks of dusty tomes beside a plump sofa

Enya witches: tarot, quartz and labradorite, a pinch of salt thrown over a shoulder, a well-worn rabbit’s foot

Florence Welch witches: floor-length veils, daisy crowns, antlers, knotwork, flying ointment

Like, you do even a cursory look at how some people are mistreated during actual, like….giving birth? Like non-consensual episiotomies or “the husband stitch.”

The fact that only 17 states treat marital rape the same as non-marital rape? That marital rape  has less severe penalties, or excludes situations where no violence is used, or has shorter reporting periods.

The fact that young women routinely have their requests for tubal ligation denied. 

Forced sterilization has been a huge issue: for native american women, for women in prison, and some countries even require trans women and intersex women to be sterilized before they can legally change their names.

I mean it. You’re getting the attention you think you want, all eyes on you. Except ours. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” Your fellow waiters ask us, concerned. Behind the triage window, you can’t hear our teeth grinding. You’re in pain, i understand that. This might even be the worst pain you’ve ever felt. But you’re probably not dying.

Dying isn’t loud. A patient having a heart attack does not scream and thrash and gasp for air. It’s a whisper, a tightness, with slow flexing fingers. A stroke happens in a fraction of an instant, and never makes any sound. More whispers, halves of sentences and muscles that don’t quite match up anymore, a puppet with a few of the strings cut. Alarmed and wandering eyes, maybe, but never yelling. Or the more common killers, infections that shut down organs or the pipes of blood that sever. Cardiac or respiratory failure. If a person can talk they are, in fact, breathing just fine.

They left a child in the nurses break room for 30 minutes with no explanation. Just wheeled me in there and left me crying my eyes out surrounded by people playing angry birds on their phones.

When I finally saw a nurse she gave me TYLENOL and told me to go home with my mom because my foot was “a little swollen”. They wrapped it in gauze. They were mad because I was making so much noise but my foot literally felt like it was on fire.

four hours.

someone prodded at my stomach and decided that since the pain wasn’t in the right place to be a ruptured appendix, it was just gas. after that, the only nurses who even came near me only came to tell me to be quiet.

my parents begged for someone, anyone, to listen – he never cries, they said, he never whines, i’ve never heard him make this noise before, something is really really wrong! this kid fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone and got up laughing! when he stepped on broken glass he just said ‘uh i guess you better fetch a towel’! jesse does not scream, please someone at least try to find out what’s wrong, isn’t this a hospital?

all anyone said was, kids make such a fuss. stop being dramatic.

meanwhile, i was entering an altered state from the unrelenting pain, hallucinating and giggling through my sobs, having mini blackouts. i bit clean through a paperback book before someone finally came around to take me to x-ray “though i’m sure we won’t find anything.” the x-ray technician snapped “you don’t need that” and snatched my teddy bear, tossing it on a counter, where it would’ve been left behind if my mother hadn’t noticed me coming out of the room without it (they didn’t let her come in with me) and gone charging in to get it.

more waiting, because x-rays took time to develop back then. more contempt and cold shoulders, and me wondering if i could maybe walk just enough to get out to the highway and dive in front of a semi, because hell cannot be any worse than this.

and then suddenly, here’s a doctor who is in a huge hurry and we are going to give me a great big enema right fucking now because the x-ray found a bowel obstruction as hard as stone and my intestines are going to rupture any second! hurry hurry, don’t you know how high the fatality rate is for sepsis from a ruptured bowel? terrified eleven year old, dehydrated and seeing double and too weak to stand, gets what feels like a garden hose full of lava shoved up his butt, and then they point me at a toilet and leave me there.

result: child on the floor, erupting from both ends. nurse’s reaction: anger and disgust.

pretty much everything from the x-ray on, i remember as if i was watching myself on tv. by the time they left me in the bathroom i wasn’t crying anymore. i was just sort of… nearby, while things happened to my body. i wondered if my bowel was still in danger of rupturing, but i couldn’t find it in me to care.

i was finally quiet.

Cause I clearly remember when I was and I sure as hell was not quiet.

I got out of a c-section, which I’d been allowed to be put to sleep through because my anxiety had me disassociating and having consecutive panic attacks for an hour past when I should have been in, at which point my child should have already been born. I woke up and I can remember screaming and crying. My stomach had literally been sliced open and I could feel it. I don’t think I’d screamed or cried that hard ever. I eventually was able to stop only because it hurt worse.

Imagine if someone came into your ER screaming their head off because they felt pain like this. You would ignore them.

Surely she wouldn’t post pictures of her fiance (with his real name) linking to an Instagram account (with her real name and location) to make it so easy to find her job and ensure they know that she’s setting them up for a heap of malpractice lawsuits, right?

Food Purses

Rommy De Bommy