La Isla Incantada

Tomorrow I ' m going to Puerto Rico for a conference, returning Wednesday night. It ' s the International Conference on Communication in Healthcare. I ' m doing a poster and an oral presentation, and moderating three sessions, so I ' ll be busy. I should still have time to post however and if there are any interesting highlights you ' ll get them.My own talk is about experiences of people with substance use disorder with health care. The technical term for my finding is that they are treated like shit. There ' s much more than I can fit in there but I ' ll give you a few quotations from my interviews. These are people who were hospitalized.Iactually went in for appendicitis or pancreatitis. They said I was only there for drugs, and I was like “What’s this lump on my stomach if I’m only here for drugs. My appendix had burst. I passed out in the waiting room.I get wicked bad abscesses on myface, I will go into theER and they ’ll immediately think I’m drug seeking. Any time they need to give me a shot and Ihave to pull my sleeves up, the nurse will stop and run out and tell “Oh you got track marks.” They always do that.I had a gastro issue, I would get sick for the whole day, throwing up.So I went to thehospital and they kept asking me “Did you take your methadone?” I started throwing up violently and I peed my pants. I asked the nurse, “Can you please help me?” after he’s coming into my room every five minutes “Did you take your methadone? Did you sell...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs