Thread by @usnehal

One of the shifts in my social media since my mother passed away is to engage in ways that people who are human, results-oriented, genuine can interact.. while recognizing there will always be the folks here for optics. It's a reminder to spend my time, energy, care for results.

You'll find threads on how I learned strength from my late mother

Is what I relied on when she was in the ICU or when we were living in a war zone

That's in contrast to the fragile & "threat!" approach that was on display with the Amy Cooper incident

bet.com/news/national/…

Keeping in mind that Amy Cooper campaigned/fundraised for Obama

yet, when, from the looks of it the black man was not important enough or she may have felt no one would find out

she threatened a black man in a mechanism of white power: "vulnerability"

discourseblog.substack.com/p/amy-cooper-i…

This is a racist trope that plays out against black women as well as was used against #DrSusanMoore - a hospital executive put in an official statement that her knowledge was "intimiating" to nurses caring for her. This was a patient dying of COVID.

https://twitter.com/Lachelle_Dawn/status/1343926002171441152?s=20

Keep in mind what #COVID19 does to you
A frequent manifestation is #ARDS
=your own lungs waterboarding/drowning you
=torture

Yet we expect such patients, especially if they are doctors + black to be able to not "intimidate" while experiencing this?:
mayoclinic.org/diseases-condi…

You'll have to pardon me if I don't trust people whose pain IS seen to be the spokesperson

for those whose pain is either denied or justified

Some of us "want" pain?

Not a doctor/nurse thing

This is a racism, implicit bias, structural racism thing

insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/2…

The last moments my mother was conscious they were still thinking she had a simple pneumonia (I asked about ARDS, told no). No CT to check for PE. Told we could wait to talk to her.

Until she was suddenly intubated

Suddenly she was ARDS and we were being pushed to agree to DNR.

I too can "intimidate":
-I have knowledge
-am a doctor
-ask questions like "If she is COVID+ and she has bilateral infiltrates, could this be ARDS?"

I'm also Muslim
Waterboarding is seen as valid when done to Muslims
My mother was Muslim
"Despite" that she deserved humanity

I am a factual person
I will not claim if/then when there is too much complexity

Fact is my WOC Muslim >65 mother was also in a state with this kind of staffing issues on nursing. The ICU patient to nurse ration was 3:1 or 4:1 despite vents & drips

mediakit.nurse.com/texas-nursing-…

Race aside, there is also flagrant ageism in #COVID19 added to existing ageism. "High risk" is used to justify "don't even try" or "already dead "in some people's minds. So I can't, with any validity, tell you the true cause(s) when it is so multifactoral

thelancet.com/journals/lanhl…

The push for DNR, at times, was fairly transparently communicated as reducing liability to the clinicians and hospital in a high risk patient

DNR may not be the wrong thing to do

Fact is, good communication on DNR, is a massive mess, as we experienced

journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/do-not…

Am thankful every single day for my late mother for having her brain, her training to emotionally regulate, faith she taught me, and the ability to navigate spaces full of -isms as a woman, WOC, daughter of >65 parents so I can process all this logically, all while grieving.

I am trying to imagine what it would be like to be able to be "fragile", "delicate"

Meh, why waste energy on something irrelevant to me?

Amid that will be those who will engage out of fragile ego, optics, need to be important, need to "save" me or communities to which I belong

I've said it before, I will say it again: I am grateful for this resource that @RobinCogan shared with me.

It's been my roadmap for navigating now that my pillar of strength, my mother, is gone from this world and I can only have her in my own heart:

mayoclinic.org/diseases-condi…

White nurses like @RobinCogan absolutely have a role to play. We CAN play together in one sandbox

The number of people who have reached out via various media to offer substantive, actionable support or unobtrusive "I am here for you" is innumerable. I won't be able to name all

Did I feel most comfortable with it was black female nurses and black respiratory therapists caring for my mother when I could not be at her side?

Yes

Is that racist?

No, because centering (on) black women ensures quality for all in any domain

marketplace.org/2020/09/01/why…

Are doctors part of the problem? Of course. As a WOC physician, my experience or the experiences of black women, BIPOC physicins is denied by our own peers, our own profession.

That does not mean we should be invalidated externally too as doctors.

medpagetoday.com/publichealthpo…

It means there is a lot of work to be done for an interdisciplinary approach that centers black women

We must work through conceptual models that account for the structural and policy drivers of these results, even for black women who seem "privileged."

npr.org/2017/12/07/568…

Who gets the progressive deprioritization? I had crossposted this to @LinkedIn

My mother, who used to read all my posts there, and I had an in depth discussion. She said how it made her understand a lot of things about race and racism in America

https://twitter.com/TamorahLewisMD/status/1343329088325476352?s=20

Am grateful to @TamorahLewisMD sharing her wisdom. Was one of my favorite last conversations with my late mother. It has allowed me to explain this to many others as well. The thread demonstrates why we should let black women speak for their own selves, not label "intimidating"

My mother did have awareness of colorism from South Asia.

From a #globalhealth perspective, colorism and antiblackness is not always the driving factor, though, like the xenophobia towards refugees.

This is some of my multidisciplinary work on that:

mededportal.org/doi/10.15766/m…

Today in the car back from a park, my almost 6-year old nephew was asking when coronavirus will end. I used the analogy of how often he and his 5 siblings agreed on the same thing?

He pointed out that they all agreed they wanted to visit "Nani" at the cemetery. Okay, true...

Sometimes trying to use a modified Socratic method with a 6-year old backfires.

Well, besides that one time yesterday...

My point was that for the pandemic to end, we need cooperation across many people, cities, states, countries. How easy is that?

There is an immorality of empathy that drives advocacy storytelling in the U.S. & other spaces.

The fact that #drsusanmoore was vilified for self-advocating is why POC in the U.S. need/rely on white allies, storytellers whose pain/distress is believed

qz.com/1024303/empath…

If we want to end a pandemic, we actually have to start to care about ALL people

We can't simply align with racism of who is the right storyteller to be heard to try to get things done

Xenophobia wins elections but it does not end pandemics
khou.com/article/news/h…

And it is already starting in Texas. POC can't always conveniently line up behind a "valid" (white) advocate to speak for us. Sometimes we will have to say things ourselves, like this Mexican restaurant using "choice" on masks. Is "choice" for POC?

thehill.com/homenews/state…

Many of us brown & black folk would like to be allowed the humanity, "vulnerability" & fragility others are allowed. Am grateful for what black women teach us in America. My mother's context sometimes centered on Pakistan or England (colonial history)

bbc.com/news/av/explai…

Whereas in America it is black women who can teach us the most important lessons about structural inequity at the intersection of race, gender & various other factors. It's these same black women who win elections and flip states with voter suppression

greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/h…

Which brings me back to that scary word that tends to trigger & offend the "optics" types:

results

Black women & WOC deliver results
Being effective can intimidate those who are fragile
We need to get over such barriers

lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-the…

pcpcc.org/resource/white…

I don't think a lot of things that are needed are going to happen in my lifetime, given the awfully flat slope of that "arc or justice" in the U.S. (& significant backsliding)

So what I have during my lifetime is all of you who are rainbows in my clouds

Thank you to each of you who brings an authentic intellectual curiosity, able to manage your ego, can play well in a sandbox, and are results-oriented to work on multi-sector, multi-institutional, multidisciplinary solutions - is the way we can help keep others' mothers alive.

@threadreaderapp please unroll