Bear in mind that ambulance companies aren’t diverting EMTs away from a heart attack or traumatic amputation to answer your call. They’re much more likely to be diverting EMTs from:
Sitting in an ambulance station or a random parking lot playing Words With Friends and/or developing elaborate company-wide romantic intrigues
Sitting in a hospital EMS room doing giant stacks of paperwork no one will ever read while trying to make dinner entirely out of saltines and condiments
Routine transports of people who have to travel by stretcher, who maybe are not happy to be late, but are hardly going to die from it
Transports which are technically emergencies, but are stuff like vomiting or a sprained ankle where the urgency factor is more like “yeah, you should get that seen” than like “STAT CODE RED CODE BLUE CODE POLKA DOT STAT STAT STAT.”
So if you think you might need an ambulance, call one. You are not going to single-handedly take down the EMS system by daring to use it.
I’m reblogging it but I would be that person wondering “Do I need this enough” until I died.
I have legitimately done this. Please, take care of yourselves.
Furthermore, guys, we have dispatch. Dispatch makes sure that we’re all where we need to be, so you’re not taking an ambulance away from someone who “needs it more.”
Let dispatch worry if an ambulance needs to be somewhere else. You just worry about taking care of yourself.
There is a mistaken notion that trauma is primarily about memory—the story of what has happened…It’s a too-simplistic view in my opinion. Your whole mind, brain and sense of self is changed in response to trauma.
In the long term the largest problem of being traumatized is that it’s hard to feel that anything that’s going on around you really matters. It is difficult to love and take care of people and get involved in pleasure and engagements because your brain has been re-organized to deal with danger.
It is only partly an issue of consciousness. Much has to do with unconscious parts of the brain that keep interpreting the world as being dangerous and frightening and feeling helpless. You know you shouldn’t feel that way, but you do, and that makes you feel defective and ashamed.
the quicker u come to terms with the fact that people change/grow and are complex and contradictory the less ur likely to set them to binaries ++save urself the false sense of deceit when they dont comply to ur preconceived notions of them. cool cheers
Friendly reminder (uwu!) that if you are in the mood to read all the notes people have written in bookmarks of your AO3 fics, you can go to this URL, replacing my username with yours:
“Got from firethesound’s bookmarks. Aka that one author who did the Harry Potter fic with like 20 dildos.”
I’m so genuinely pleased to be following in the footsteps of my philosophical forebears. I can only hope that, over time, I can rise up to meet their expectations.
Notes to self: add – more – dildos.
(dildoes?)
IT PLEASES ME GREATLY THAT MY REPUTATION IS 20 DILDOS. 😀 😀 😀
i’m starting to hate the frequency of pinterest as a google result more than i hate pinterest itself. listen, google, googly-mate, pinterest isn’t a fuckign source. I want the sites those pictures came from because those are the ones with information such as dates, which is the entire point of the thing I am googling.
Damn right. How the hell am I supposed to find tutorials on how to do wire work or bead weaving when the first howevermany pages of Google results are some idiot’s cluster of Pinterest collections of those tutorials?
SOMEONE ELSE HATES PINTEREST AS MUCH AS I DO
not only does it fuck with sourcing images, but you can’t even SEE the images unless you have a ~pinterest account~ which I have zero interest in acquiring; it does this so completely adorable coy little thing where it shows you half the page and then when you scroll down it goes *complicated tiresome flower emoji face* JOIN PINTEREST 2 SEE MORE! *complicated tiresome flower emoji face* and my systolic reading spikes.
and google lists individual pinterest pages as separate results, so if a picture is popular, there can be HUNDREDS of pinterest listings before you find anything you could possibly trace back to a source.
listen, all my art bros who are mad about people not sourcing art, i dig that, i agree that sourcing is important, but maybe stop saying reverse image search is easy or ‘30 seconds’ or whatever. sometimes it’s just straight up impossible because fucking pinterest ruins everything.
SUPER EASY WAY TO AVOID PINTEREST: type your query and then -pinterest
7 of the first 12 results are from pinterest
zero items from pinterest not a single one I’m free
Being a good person is a choice. Don’t let people fool you into believing that truly good people never have bad thoughts, are never tempted by the easier path, by the low road, never mess up or act out selfishly. Never believe a person can be good without making a conscious effort.
Every single time you do something good, you’ve made a decision to make the world a little brighter.
Goodness is not an inherent trait, it is a choice. Keep making it! I see you, I’m proud of you, and I’m rooting for you!
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief.
I didn’t know our wait was just beginning.
I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. We answered their questions: When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being worst?
“Eleven,” Rachel croaked.
As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.
“Ovarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,” says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. “High clinical suspicion is important. … Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.” The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.
* * *
There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony. Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. I felt like I could bend iron, tear nylon, through the 10-minute ambulance ride and as we entered the windowless basement hallways of the hospital.
And there we stopped. The intake line was long—a row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel. Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.
Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition. Most hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index, a five-level system that categorizes patients on a scale from “resuscitate” (treat immediately) to “non-urgent” (treat within two to 24 hours).
I knew which end of the spectrum we were on. Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight. I flagged down the first nurse I could.
“My wife,” I said. “I’ve never seen her like this. Something’s wrong, you have to see her.”
“She’ll have to wait her turn,” she said. Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.
Soon, I started to realize—in a kind of panic—that there was no system of triage in effect. The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones. It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when we’d be seen.
As we neared the ward’s open door, a nurse came to take Rachel’s blood pressure. By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldn’t get her reading.
She sighed and put down her squeezebox.
“You’ll have to sit still, or we’ll just have to start over,” she said.
Finally, we pulled her bed inside. They strapped a plastic bracelet, like half a handcuff, around Rachel’s wrist.
* * *
From an early age we’re taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely.Wait your turn. But during an emergency, established codes evaporate—this is why ambulances can run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road. I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. I kept having the strange impulse to take out my phone and call 911, as if that might transport us back to an urgent, responsive world where emergencies exist.
The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.
Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. “Stones,” one of the nurses had pronounced. That made sense. I could believe that. I knew that kidney stones caused agony but never death. She’d be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain.
By 10 a.m., Rachel’s cot had moved into the “red zone” of the E.R., a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls. She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too. He never touched her body. He asked a few quick questions, and then left. His visit was so brief it didn’t register that he was the person overseeing Rachel’s care.
Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachel’s trembling arm. We didn’t know it, but the doctor had prescribed the standard pain-management treatment for patients with kidney stones: hydromorphone for the pain, followed by a CT scan.
The pain medicine started seeping in. Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. But for the first time that morning, she rested.
* * *
Leslie Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” examines ways that different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence. In an interview included in her book The Empathy Exams, she discussed the piece, saying: “Months after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasn’t taken seriously at the ER.”
She was talking about Rachel.
“Women are likely to be treated less aggressively until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.”
“That to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,” she said. “Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.”
“Female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated”: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachel’s pain, even plain ignored it. In her essay, Jamison refers back to “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” a study identifying ways gender bias tends to play out in clinical pain management. Women are “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients,’” the study concludes—a phenomenon referred to in the medical community as “Yentl Syndrome.”
In the hospital, a lab tech made small talk, asked me how I like living in Brooklyn, while my wife struggled to hold still enough for the CT scan to take a clear shot of her abdomen.
“Lot of patients to get to, honey,” we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers. “Don’t cry.”
I felt certain of this: The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”
Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.
“My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.” Rachel does struggle with this, even now. How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings? Friends have heard the story, and still she finds herself searching for language to tell it again, again, as if the experience is a vast terrain that can never be fully circumscribed by words. Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.
For hours, nothing happened. Around 3 o’clock, we got the CT scan and came back to the ER. Otherwise, Rachel lay there, half-asleep, suffering and silent. Later, she’d tell me that the hydromorphone didn’t really stop the pain—just numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.
If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
Eventually, the doctor—the man who’d come to Rachel’s bedside briefly, and just once—packed his briefcase and left. He’d been around the ER all day, mostly staring into a computer. We only found out later he’d been the one with the power to rescue or forget us.
When a younger woman came on duty to take his place, I flagged her down. I told her we were waiting on the results of a CT scan, and I hassled her until she agreed to see if the results had come in.
When she pulled up Rachel’s file, her eyes widened.
“What is this mess?” she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.
“Oh my god,” she murmured, as though I wasn’t standing there to hear. “He never did an exam.”
The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stones—Dilauded for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, he’d never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.
If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.
“She has a large mass in her abdomen,” the female doctor said. “We don’t know what it is.”
That’s when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words liketumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because we’d asked to wait our turn all through the day—longer than a standard office shift—only to find out we’d been an emergency all along.
Suddenly, the world responded with the urgency we wanted. I helped a nurse push Rachel’s cot down a long hallway, and I ran beside her in a mad dash to make the ultrasound lab before it closed. It seemed impossible, but we were told that if we didn’t catch the tech before he left, Rachel’s care would have to be delayed until morning.
“Whatever happens,” Rachel told me while the tech prepared the machine, “don’t let me stay here through the night. I won’t make it. I don’t care what they tell you—I know I won’t.”
Soon, the tech was peering inside Rachel through a gray screen. I couldn’t see what he saw, so I watched his face. His features rearranged into a disbelieving grimace.
By then, Rachel and I were grasping at straws. We thought: cancer. We thought: hysterectomy. Lying there in the dim light, Rachel almost seemed relieved.
“I can live without my uterus,” she said, with a soft, weak smile. “They can take it out, and I’ll get by.”
She’d make the tradeoff gladly, if it meant the pain would stop.
After the ultrasound, we led the gurney—slowly, this time—down the long hall to the ER, which by then was completely crammed with beds. Trying to find a spot for Rachel’s cot was like navigating rush-hour traffic.
Then came more bad news. At 8 p.m., they had to clear the floor for rounds. Anyone who was not a nurse, or lying in a bed, had to leave the premises until visiting hours began again at 9.
When they let me back in an hour later, I found Rachel alone in a side room of the ER. So much had happened. Another doctor had told her the mass was her ovary, she said. She had something called ovarian torsion—the fallopian-tube twists, cutting off blood. There was no saving it. They’d have to take it out.
Rachel seemed confident and ready.
“He’s a good doctor,” she said. “He couldn’t believe that they left me here all day. He knows how much it hurts.”
When I met the surgery team, I saw Rachel was right. Talking with them, the words we’d used all day—excruciating, emergency, eleven—registered with real and urgent meaning. They wanted to help.
By 10:30, everything was ready. Rachel and I said goodbye outside the surgery room, 14 and a half hours from when her pain had started.
* * *
Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.” She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.
Sometimes we inspect the scars on her body together, looking at the way the pink, raised skin starts blending into ordinary flesh. Maybe one day, they’ll become invisible. Maybe they never will.
This made me SOOOO FUCKING ANGRY
children get ignored the same way, incidentally. when i was 12 i waited 4 hours in the emergency room with an impacted bowel. i was in so much pain that i bit through the corner of a paperback book. even with both my parents flagging down nurses and doctors multiple times to say “you don’t understand, this is not how he reacts to things, he has a really high pain tolerance, he laughed off a broken collarbone, he never cries,” all i got was scolded for making noise.
that’s right, a 12-year-old child failed to contain his cries of agony, and the hospital staff snapped at him for it.
when at last the x-ray happened, the tech made fun of me for clutching a comfort toy.
the solution to my problem was an enema. i’d been retching up bile from the pain for hours; when they gave me the enema, i convulsed for the millionth time and basically exploded from both ends. the nurse overseeing this let me know how disgusted she was with me for making such a mess.
when we took this story to my GP and she looked at the information, she told me my bowel could have ruptured at any time, and without treatment i would’ve lived no more than 24 hours, probably less than 12.
4 of which i spent waiting for someone to even try to help me. because ‘kids exaggerate’ and ‘teenagers play things up for attention’.
abdominal pain has been a PTSD trigger for me ever since, and will be for the rest of my life. every time i get a stomachache, every time i get gas, every time i see someone on tv get gutshot or even punched in the stomach, there it is: the memory of torment so extreme that i physically couldn’t stop myself from screaming, while my mother wept and my father desperately tried to hold himself back from hulking out, and knowing that the people who could save me refused to try because they held me in such contempt.
Yeah. Friend of mine fainted in class, multiple times, before anyone decided her anemia might be serious. She had thyroid cancer. Same friend: appendix RUPTURED, because everyone, including her, thought it was period cramps until she was in the early stages of septic shock. Lower pelvic pain is seen as nfbd in people with certain anatomy. We’re routinely expected to shrug it off, told it can’t be that bad, we endure it regularly, everyone feels that way. I’ve seen fibroids bigger than your head. Ovarian cysts that weighed more than an infant. No big deal. Right?
We know so little about the uterus and ovaries and their effect on the human body, and yet we don’t want to study them. *pissed OFF.* I think Graham’s right when he said that a lot of the ignorance and misinformation around uterine healthcare is based off a desire to keep people with them disempowered.
Doctors gave me a decade of “ice and ibuprofen” noise for excruciating wrist and hand pain and numbness until i said the magic words “the pain is so bad it wakes me up at night”
For some reason, that exact phrase opens doors. But you have to say it, not just describe it, or they will let your problem sort itself out until you do.
Three excruciating nerve conduction tests didn’t open that door, but mentioning how it messed up my sleep (the least of my problems, i had thought) threw it right open. Do not be timid, they will send you away with the least help they can provide. Assume any doctor is deaf to anything short of certain rote declarations of suffering that have been trained to listen for and make them hear you.
If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t.
Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof.
This concludes me attempting to be helpful.
yo I can vouch for this I’ve done this for the last few cakes I’ve made and holy crap it makes suuuuch a difference the cake is still fluffy, but it also seems more dense, and it doesn’t dry out like at all you can leave it uncovered on the counter all day after being cut into, and it won’t get all crusty and dry this is an amazing way to take your cakes to the next level
OK Highway Patrol Captain George Brown says the best “tip” for women to not get raped by a cop is to “follow the law in the first place so you don’t get pulled over.” http://youtu.be/BO8g8akPWcY (Last third of the video).
Three serial rapists in 3 weeks arrested in Oklahoma, all cops.
Pro tip: if you’re signaled to pull over (whether you’re male or female) and you’re in a place that has no witnesses, turn your hazard lights on to acknowledge the officer’s siren, and drive to the nearest gas station or populated area. This is accepted protocol by every agency. You are not obligated pull over until you can do so safely. This includes personal safety. Understand your rights, brothers and sisters. There are disgusting examples of authority in this world.
HAZARD LIGHTS ARE NOT AN ACCEPTABLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. IT IS NOT ACCEPTED PROTOCOL BY EVERY AGENCY. DO NOT JUST CONTINUE DRIVING WITH YOUR HAZARD LIGHTS IN CASE THE COP MIGHT THINK IT’S A LOW-SPEED CHASE.
I know that sounds dumb, but hear me out. My mother is a dispatcher for the local police station. I asked her about how to pull over for a cop and even brought up the use of hazard lights, and she told me that it is not always accepted. This is what she told me you can do in order to feel safe when pulling over:
Call the police. No, really. Call and tell the dispatcher where you are and that there is a cop behind you demanding you pull over. The dispatcher can and will stay on the line with you while they look up the area you’re in to see if it’s one of their station’s cops. Then, once the cop comes to your window, you can crack it open (it only has to be an inch!) while still on the phone with the dispatcher. This is definitely, 100% accepted protocol.
The dispatcher will verify that it is their own, real cop, and they will gladly stay on the line with you throughout your interaction with the officer. And God forbid this ever happens to any of you, but if something were to happen to you during this time, you’ve already contacted 911 and given your location to the dispatcher.
Please keep this in mind if you are ever requested to pull over and do not feel safe. The dispatcher will understand. Do not, however, continue to drive, because there might be the off-chance an officer will think you’re flat-out refusing to pull over (a well-lit, populated area might be a ways away).
Stay safe.
Signal boost.
Because I personally know some creepy ass mother fuckers who became cops because they’re demented psychopaths and they get off on having control over people.
In light of current bullshit, this might be a good idea for a LOT of people, not just women. Marginalized minorities of all stripes, take note. I hate taking up an emergency dispatcher’s resources, but i also hate seeing yet another fucked up news story about police harming citizens.
just moving along like everyone else 