The Medical Profession Is Utterly Screwed

my adventure in the ER

This morning, a freak occurrence gave me a powerful lesson in how completely, totally, thoroughly, and utterly fucked the medical profession is, and likely will be, for some time. I’m more frustrated by my own reactions than I am over the fact that I’ve almost certainly hit my insurance-out-of-pocket for the year when the bill arrives.

So, dear readers, here’s that story.

What Happened Over Breakfast

Early this morning, I was standing in the kitchen spreading cream cheese on a bagel, post-run, when my vision went blurry. It was sudden and severe, with floaters and flashing. The floaters were apparent in both eyes, but much more severe on the left. On the left, there was a long, thin floater that acted like a prism, causing weird light distortions.

My immediate fear was that I was having a stroke. A kid I grew up with had a stroke at age six, and one of my cousins had a stroke at fifteen, so I have always been hyper-aware of this possibility. I went straight to the bathroom and smiled into the mirror, checking my face for drooping, and held out my arms to check for drifting. With neither of those suggesting a stroke, I sat down and waited for it to pass, taking deep breaths to calm myself.

The symptoms got worse over the next few minutes, particularly in the left eye. The only possibility I knew of that could be that severe, other than a stroke, is a detached retina. As the left eye was so much more severe than the right, this seemed scarily plausible.

I am not sure I can adequately describe the terror I felt in that moment.

I’m deaf (reliant on powerful hearing aids), and I thought the vision in my left eye was in immediate peril.

Those of you who aren’t PTSD-types may not grasp this, but my brain snapped into a disassociation mode. I was aware that there was a possibility that my vision was threatened and that this possibility was terrifying, but those facts ceased to matter on an emotional level. What my therapist calls my “robot mode” took over. I calmly messaged the people who were waiting to hear from me about various work and personal matters (though I had to use Siri, as I couldn’t see well enough to type on my phone normally), threw a hoodie on over my running gear, and carefully drove myself to the hospital.

In this state, I was well aware of my emotional terror underneath the surface, but it was very much akin to being on an opioid. (That’s not a very good comparison, but it’s the only one I’ve got.) If you’ve ever taken Percocet after surgery, for example—you may remember that opioids don’t relieve pain so much as they make you cease to care about the pain.

I knew that I was petrified, but the robot mode was overriding it so thoroughly that my awareness was purely detached and separate from the part of me operating my body and making choices.

It’s 20 minutes to the hospital from where I live. About halfway there — approximately half an hour after the onset of symptoms — it started to resolve on its own. By the time I arrived at the ER, the symptoms were 90% resolved.

What Happened At the Hospital

I live in a cobalt blue area, where people got furious at our governor for refusing to institute a(nother) statewide mask mandate. The worst cliche of the religious cult I grew up in, that of the goody two shoes child who asks the parents to be stricter, come to life.

So it wasn’t a surprise when I walked into the ER still in my calm, PTSD-disassociated state, but the hospital quickly snapped me back to reality. Before I could get to the desk and let them know the urgency of the problem, I was stopped and required to put on a mask, which made my glasses instantly fog up—my breathing was suddenly heavy and ragged. (With the fury I felt that I had to be harassed on COVID grounds before I could get attention for the potential loss of my vision, the terror of being a deaf person who fears she’s going blind flooded back in, and before I was consciously aware of my emotions, I was struggling not to cry).

After some frantic, “No, no travel, no COVID symptoms, I’m in the ER with an actual emergency” type responses, they let me go through (not without making me pull the mask over my nose, though).

They took me direclty to triage, where a nurse immediately did a visual acuity test. They did not let me pull the mask down until the third or fourth time I said “My glasses are fogged, so I don’t know.” I got angrier each time, struggling to contain my fury and panic and not end up having the worst possible thing for my PTSD in that moment — a male security guard/cop/authority figure showing up to monitor my behavior — be made reality.

My blood pressure, normally 100/70, was 160/100.

Two eyeball ultrasounds and four full checks for a stroke later, the diagnosis was that while my retina was not fully detached, it was possibly partially so, and the ophthalmologist upstairs needed to see me immediately. If detached, I would need immediate surgery.

The Medical Profession Is Utterly Fucked

I was so scared that the first thing I did, in the elevator on my way upstairs to see the ophthalmologist, was email my therapist. As someone who has been practicing in this area for a long time, hearing the intimate details of many people’s lives, he may not know the best surgeon to ask for, but he would at least be able to tell me “don’t use Dr. So-and-So” if there were any hacks in the area who should be avoided. He replied quickly, giving me the name of a local practice whose surgeons he had heard good things about, which was a huge help on the anxiety front.

The second thing I did was to google for stories of getting treatment for detached retinas. What had doctors missed? What questions had people wished they knew to ask?

Rainbow Lanyard Preacher Man

When I walked into ophthalmology, wearing an ER bracelet and carrying ER referral/discharge papers, the first thing that happened re-ignited the fury that had been sublimated to fear while in the elevator.

A white male with a rainbow lanyard holding his hospital ID raised his voice and demanded, when I was a good twenty feet from the desk, “Where’s your mask?!?!”

Every worker and waiting patient turned to stare at me.

I said, using every ounce of self-control I had not to invite him to go fuck himself:

“I was sent directly from the ER for an emergency exam because I may have a partially detached retina.”

“You should be in a mask! You have to put a mask on before I can help you!”

I took a couple of deep breaths, knowing that if I started crying I would have a PTSD-activated-level of an emotional reaction, not a normally-upset-by-something-scary-and-stressful emotional reaction.

I said, in a voice that I hope was calm but also loud enough for all the staring people to hear:

“Yes, I understand that you do not care in the slightest if the deaf patient standing in front of you also loses her sight, so please, give me a mask. Give me ten masks. Give me whatever you require to help me with the emergency eye exam I’ve been sent directly from the ER to get. Because I can’t hear, so I really really really need to be able to see.”

He glared at me while pointing me to a box of masks.

No, they weren’t N95s and there was no one there doing fitting tests.

It was the usual surgical mask, the ridiculous, ineffective bullshit that the Woke religion uses as a symbol of holiness.

I put the mask on and was taken back almost at once for the exam.

Once in the exam room, I was quickly given permission, by the nurse, to remove the mask “since we need you to wear your glasses for some of it and it’ll fog your glasses right up, won’t it?”

Yeah.

The Horrible Truth About What Equity & Wokeness Have Done

When the doctor finally arrived, I was overwhelmed with relief immediately.

Why?

I’m not happy about what I’m about to say. I’m a little bit horrified and a lot frustrated, but I’m going to say it anyway. Because it’s true.

I felt at least half my anxiety leave as soon as the doctor introduced himself, because: he was old, white, and male. I prefer and request female providers (old ones, ideally) when I have to take any clothing off, but for an eye exam, when I was terrified that I, a deaf person, had my vision in jeopardy? I was relieved. I’m not aware of any grandma-aged eye doctors in my tiny state; if there had been, she’d be the only person I would have preferred to see walk in.

That told me at once that he was educated before Wokeness took over medicine, and he didn’t get into medicine on any lowered standards or judged by any “equity” metrics. He was a smart, hard-working physician who had been trained back when reality trumped ideology. My trust shot way up and my anxiety continued to abate. He did the most intense and thorough eye exam I’ve ever had (by several orders of magnitude).

I am a woman working in tech, known to my team as “the one who can do the math,” and I have a side hustle as a math tutor.

I hate, loathe, resent, and despise the feelings I experienced today.

And yet I cannot deconstruct them with reason. There is no rational basis for trusting doctors who are young enough to have been influenced by Wokeness, or to trust that they got into (and through) medical school on merit instead of equity.

This is appalling. This is horrifying. This is disgusting.

It’s also true. And truth matters.

Diagnosis: Another Weird Medical Anomaly

Kids who grow up with chronic stress, in abusive situations that keep their developing brains and nervous systems marinating in cortisol, often have bizarrely weird medical issues. I had a 1-in-2-million medical event a few years ago, about which the specialist asked me, hesitating, “This is so rare that we know very little about it, but all we know for sure is that (the problem) does tend to correlate to PTSD. Do you perhaps have any trauma in your background…?” (I laughed until I cried.)

A friend of mine, with a similar childhood, had a heart attack at age 36; another friend, whose childhood makes mine look like Leave It to Beaver, has the kind of arthritis that normally settles in around age 70, but she’s only 26.

My eyes, thank all the gods who do not exist, are fine.

I am apparently one of the very, very rare people under age 50 who experience migraine aura without migraine headache pain. The condition is not uncommon, but generally happens in people who’ve had migraines for years. For reasons not well understood, as they age, they continue to get migraine visual disturbances, but stop having migraine pain.

In extremely rare and poorly understood circumstances (ha ha ha ha ha), some people, often as a response to chronic stress (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha), start off with this “old person” type of migraine. They get their first one as a migraine aura without headache, and they always do what I did, he said—think they’re going blind and go directly to the ER. This will likely happen again. I am encouraged to keep records each time—am I stressed out about anything? What have I eaten lately? Recent exercise? Recently upset? And over time, I may be able to make lifestyle adjustments. Most importantly, next time, I will know what’s happening, and I won’t panic, thinking I’m about to go blind.

My Actual Point

I went into great detail about what happened because I have wonderful readers, many of whom will email and ask for more details, out of concern. But the telling of the eleventy-third weird rare medical story of my life isn’t actually my point.

My actual point is this: the combination of COVID lies, performative COVID bullshit that means nothing at all for anything other than virtue-signaling, and the equity measures and Wokeness in medical schools have already programmed at least some patients to trust old, white, male doctors — and them alone.

Gosh. I wonder if this aspect of American medicine is going to get worse, or better?

Which way is it trending?

What are doctors learning in med school, and will it lead to greater, or lesser, trust from patients?

What sort of people are becoming doctors and what are their thoughts on the care deserved by people they suspect of disagreeing with Wokeness?

Where do we go from here?

Friends, I have no idea. But I try to write when I feel like I have something important to say, and this felt important, so I have told my story.

Reflect upon it as you will.

(Edited for clarity and typos.)