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This week's topic is one I'm not thrilled about sharing: my visit to the emergency room last Wednesday.
As someone who is to a minor extent in the public eye + in a marginalized body, I don't share a lot of my personal medical history, both because I too deserve privacy and because it can be used against me by harassers.
But it's also important for you to learn from people with the lived experience of what it's like to be a very fat person trying to navigate systems that are invested in erasing and ending them by any means necessary.
I'll mark every instance of good care in green, and bad care in red. (If you're not sure why something is marked,
sign up for a consulting session and we'll discuss it.)
This particular story begins with a trip to a sports medicine doctor for persistent back pain. I'd already tried a few other things, so I was in fairly urgent need of treatment.
The doctor was worse than useless, one of those fatphobes who's not outright vicious, but lets his patients' body sizes inform their quality of care. He informed me that, as a woman in my early forties, this is just how I am now, and he didn't want to see me in his office again unless I was at a 10 out of 10 pain level every day.
Oh, and to exercise more.
It was unsurprising that when his assistant took my blood pressure, it was very high.
That reading went into my medical chart. When my primary care doctor saw it, she was concerned and asked me to test again at home.
I have one of the best blood pressure monitors for fat arms available, but since fat bodies are so excluded from medical equipment, I haven't been happy with it. The cuff is excruciatingly painful to use and half the time it errors out.
However, I dutifully took a reading on Tuesday night. It seemed extraordinarily high. I sent a message to my primary care doc about it and went to bed.
The next morning, I got an urgent message from her and a call from her assistant. "Go to the emergency room right now!"
But I'd been burnt so many times by bad providers before that I dawdled, not wanting to subject myself to it again. In fact, the nearest emergency room doesn't even have chairs I can sit in to wait -- they all have arms and are far too small for me.
After talking to a doctor online through my health insurance company, who also confirmed the ER was the right place to go, I went.
Thankfully, the next closest hospital to me had a waiting room with lots of double-width chairs, and many of their regular armed chairs were wide enough for me, much to my relief.
I was promptly pulled into a smaller room for triage, and a nurse took my blood pressure again. It was very high, but not "how are you still alive?" high like it had been at home. And in fact, it seemed to be coming down more.
All we could figure was that the machine had decided to give me an incorrect number rather than an error, but they kept me for a couple of hours for observation.
After waiting about an hour in the main waiting room, they put me in a smaller room inside the ER, which in addition to a bed had a solid padded bench in a corner (rather than a tiny chair with arms). The bathroom outside the room, like the bathroom at the waiting room, had a toilet paper dispenser so close to the toilet that I had to sit sideways on the seat just to pee.
After several more blood pressure readings, during which my numbers came down to my normal levels, they released me.
Everyone was polite and kind. I was asked for my height and weight, but no one made any fat-shaming comments or made me feel less than welcome, or silly for coming in with what turned out to be a false alarm. I'd been following up with my primary doc throughout the day, who was clearly genuinely concerned, relieved that I was okay and didn't make a single fat-shaming comment to add to my stress.
Every time a fat person needs healthcare, we accumulate new red-text experiences. Those experiences form a burden we carry with us; we can expect many of those experiences to be repeated every time we encounter the healthcare system.
This is often why fat patients can seem forgetful, noncompliant or resistant. Why should fat people bring providers our most open, earnest selves when we expect to add more red text to our stories each time?
