There's simply two...

Sony Playstation

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.

People’s pain tolerances are different. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/

That article is specific to how female pain is minimized (usually as hysteria). It’s even worse if you’re a WOC.

Look at what happened to Serena Williams. Greatest tennis player of all time, nearly dies in childbirth because doctors don’t want to listen to her that something is not right. Probably the only reason she is alive is because she is who she is.

There are some people who are in such chronic habitual pain that their reference point for pain doesn’t even make sense to someone not in their condition. Their resigned “I don’t know…five?” Could be someone else’s screaming 10.

Also thinking of my SIL’s father who frankly was killed by malpractice. Poor man was in screaming pain when they ignored protocol to change his catheter and they said he was faking it. He went septic because they fucked it up.

Imagine little 15 years old me, who never needed glasses or had any type of problem with their sight, suddently starting to get random headaches, pain behind their right eye, and see blurry. I went to the ER the first time when I could hardly see from said eye, and after two hours a nurse sent me back home saying that it was “just stress” and to “sleep it off”.

A week later my parents rushed me to the ER because the pain was so unbearable that I had bursted out crying during class. They explained the situation to a nurse and guess what? I was left waiting for another two hours.

I had no idea what was happening. I felt like my head was exploding, and at that point I could only see white from my right eye. After those two hours, which I spent sitting quietly with tears running down my face because the nurse had told me not to disturb the other people waiting, I noticed that my vision was going completely white.

And I freaked out.

I started wailing, sobbing my eyes out and screaming “I can’t see! I CAN’T SEE!!” while pressing the heels of both hands against my eyes because that was the only thing that made the pressure behind them more bearable.

That seemed to catch the nurses’ attention: a 15 years old kid in full blown panic attack screaming bloody murder because they had gone completely blind.

After that I was visited pretty quickly, and ended up spending almost a month in the neurology department because the optic nerve of my right eye had completely shut down. The doctor that followed me was horrified when she found out that I had spent a week walking around while my eye was in that condition. Had I been hospitalized a week before a lot of problems could have been prevented.

End result? I managed to get my vision back (though they never figured out what exactly caused the loss), but my optic nerve is permanently damaged and the tiniest stress makes my vision go blurry. I also have problems with my color perception and still get random pain.