Hi! I hope you're doing well :) please don't stop talking about how prosthesis limbs suck and your experience with them! I'm in medical school right now, and I thought it was amazing to read because it highlights 1. how doctors need to listen to their patients 2. Wow doctors kind of suck and patients should be able to advocate for themselves, and if they can't do that, someone should! And 3. Patients shouldn't be pressured into doing things they don't want to do. For me personally, I kind of already had those ideas, but your posts really put it into perspective and just emphasized them and I'm really appreciative of that :) last thing (promise) I was wondering if you've seen/read Dororo! One of the main characters (Hyakkimaru) spends the majority (like 90%) without arms, instead having sword attachments that are covered with fake arms. I was wondering if you had seen it/him and had any thoughts. If not, it might be something to check out! Thank you again :D
so i showed this ask to my girlfriend, who knows me (and my trauma) very well, and she said: "I would recommend NOT googling that character, that's for sure. this is almost the exact worst kind of thing someone could mention you check out! I wont go into detail but it's also the exact example of taking a disabled person and "fixing" them back to normal that you were talking about."
so, you're already off to a bad start i'm afraid.
listen. if you have any scraps of empathy and compassion and belief in patients' autonomy left, hold onto them, guard them, and fortify them against the education you're going through. med school will try to crush any compassion and empathy you had out of you. residency will grind your humanity for your patients down to nothing, you will be encouraged to stop seeing them as people, and your colleagues will train you to believe that you are right and know what's best, and patients are wrong and lie and are a danger to themselves. you will be taught that patients advocating for themselves rather than blindly listening is an annoying interruption to you trying to save them, or maybe even proof that they are a risk to themselves and cannot be trusted. you will be exhausted and frustrated and angry, and you will be faced with a patient who rightly believes what's best for themselves is something you believe is harmful to them. will you have enough compassion, empathy, and belief in patients' autonomy left to respect them as a human being, as a person?
you have to understand where i am coming from. i have a serious condition that's been misdiagnosed twice, forced onto treatments i didn't want, and denied treatment that would help me because of my "attitude", and once a diagnosis is on the records no doctor will consider any other possibility, so i have suffered without care for years on end. i have been sexually assaulted by doctors in their treatment rooms, and then told that's impossible BECAUSE they are a doctor, and doctors are good.
i have had surgery performed on me against my consent. this is not uncommon for disabled people. it was not necessary to save my life. i advocated, i begged, and i was denied the right to consent. it was an unneeded major surgery that harmed me, physically and psychologically, that i will never recover from.
but why would they do this, you must be asking? i must be omitting detail that makes it make sense, you are probably thinking. already thinking like a doctor, shaped by those beliefs. they MUST have been trying to help me in some way with that surgery, right? i must be lying about it, right?
my great crime there is that i was comfortable being disabled. i was at peace with loss of limb, a limb that was already failing me, already useless. i was prepared to be physically, seriously disabled, and they could not comprehend that, could not accept that. in the eyes of a doctor, losing a limb makes someone broken; disability is the enemy, and it must be fought at all cost, the patient must be FIXED at all costs, even if they don't want it. and doctors will go to extreme lengths to make that happen, patient be damned. that's a doctor's idea of compassion: patients must be fixed, even if it harms them.
to me, and most disabled folks i've ever spoken to, doctors are basically like cops; a dangerous threatening force of harm, but that you have to perform correct behavior and respect around in order to stay safe. but where cops are legally blessed to kidnap and murder you, doctors are legally blessed to kidnap and torture you, to invade and change your body in the most intimate ways, and they will tell you, themselves, and each other that they do it for your own good.
so, have i bruised your ego? are you feeling attacked, defensive, accused of being in a cohort of monsters, certain that you could never be like that, that you're one of the good ones? you're already in med school, you're already someone with the qualities to self select for it and the privilege and abledness to make it in, you already have that baggage to try and counter if you want to empathise with your patients. how much pressure has there been from your family and peers to do it, how much praise have you gotten, how much has that fed your ego, your sense of being better than others? better able to help others? better qualified to know what's best for others? i hope that you do genuinely have compassion, and empathy, and belief in patients' autonomy in you, and it's not just hollow words you tell yourself are values.
i hope you have that compassion, and can act on that belief in autonomy. because it's not just about a prostheses one can take off and throw away. if you make it through the grinder and become a doctor, one day you will be faced with a patient that says "i would rather be permanently broken in a way that you find unacceptable, than put up with the treatment you want me to have", and you will believe, with your full heart and mind and vast knowledge of medicine, you will KNOW in yourself that they are wrong.
are you willing to accept that YOU are wrong, and they are actually right? are you willing to deem them worthy of autonomy? or will you prep them for surgery to fix them, as they are begging you not to?
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
dededos
stormborns
baratheonpilled
annaxmalina
ellievsbear
izzy806
