Rachelhazideas
The presumption that every patient is someone who fakes an overdose until proven otherwise is precisely why so many people in this threat is suffering. We aren’t asking you to serve narcan on a silver platter to people who fakes an overdose. We’re just asking to be treated as humans, with empathy, without preconceptions about who we are or why we are at the ER based on our skin color, sex, age, and chronic medical conditions.
Trust us, we know what it’s like to feel demoralized at the ER. I’ve had enough close calls of neglecting life threatening conditions, enough of ER staff laughing off my pain, enough ER staff deliberately manhandling me and hurting my tender points to prove I’m ‘overreacting’, enough of waiting 6 hours only to be sent home with nothing and in more pain than I was to begin with, enough of being left to cry in pain for hours at the ER and being ridiculed for it. Many of us are demoralized to the point of fearing the ER and avoiding it even under life threatening circumstances, because going through another ER experience might be the tipping point to actually kill ourselves.
There is only so much suffering, pain, and psychological torture the human mind can endure. Most people in the ER have no idea how much chronic pain sufferers have at stake when going to the ER. I have had ER visits that left me more broken than being sexually assaulted as a teen. I trusted doctors, I trusted the hospital, and I trusted that I was in a safe space. Being painfully jabbed, mocked, laughed at, and told im lying and drug seeking were the last things I was expecting. Nothing will repair this breach of trust, because the stakes are too high. I cannot gamble away my physical and mental health for the sake of improving moral in ER staff. For you, at worse you become disillusioned with your career. For me, it’s my life that I’m risking.
You speak like someone with no conception of what pain is like outside of your own narrow experiences.
Trust me, lots of us out there would trade being meat crayoned 10 times over to get rid of our painful conditions. You can’t compare other people’s pain to your own if you haven’t experienced what they have. Even then, that’s not an excuse to deny people human pain treatment.
The problem here is that doctors would rather let 9 innocent people suffer to punish 1 drug seeker. You can’t judge how much pain is in by how someone ‘looks’. There is no ‘look’ to pain, especially in people chronic pain sufferers who have mastered the art of suffering unendingly without writhing on the floor because that’s not an option while going out in public.
I have been permanently in pain for 4 years, to the point where I have forgotten what painlessness feels like. Everyday, I wake up to a body that felt like it was sunburned for hours, fell down 3 flights of stairs, and ran 10 miles after. Everything fucking hurts and the smallest bump onto furniture feels like being stabbed with a knife. And yet, I go to the grocery store holding every whimper and tear in because I can’t shop if I’m busy writhing in pain. People see me and think I ‘look fine’ and have no idea the suicidal levels of suffering that come with invisible disabilities. Please don’t be one of them.
Mental health issues are universal. Americans aren’t anymore genetically prone to having mental health issues than other countries. The reason for America’s rampant homelessness is because of the lack of social safety nets, inaccessible healthcare, nimby-ism, and unlivable minimum wages.
The idea that homelessness is primarily a symptom of mental health issues is perpetuated to push the blame onto the homeless and absolve the exploitative upper class of responsibility. People aren’t homeless because they have mental health issues, they have mental health issues because of living with the unending threat of being one medical emergency away from homelessness.