Thread by @VABVOX

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August 26 is the 6th anniversary of my being paralyzed. This is my story. I have never adjusted to it, I have never stopped being angry about it, I have never stopped hoping I would somehow recover. I have been having PTSD flashbacks of that day and the trauma for hours.
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I am paralyzed because I was prescribed a drug that had not been tested on women and which has side-effects of spinal and other paralyzing bleeds. I am paralyzed because the first hospital where I spent 4 days ignored my pain and told me to "take Tylenol and walk it off."
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The pain was like the last hour of labor. It was as bad as abdominal surgery. I thought I might go mad from it. The first hospital knew from the scans they did that I had a huge blood clot in my left upper thigh and another in the middle of my posterior abdominal wall.
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The hospital could have given me morphine and done surgery--standard treatments. They did neither. I was on blood thinners because a year earlier I had nearly died from a pulmonary embolism (shockingly common in women). They did not stop the blood thinners.
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I'd give to hospital on the Sunday for severe pain. They sent me home on Thursday night, with no dxd and no pain medicine. I thought the ride home in our subcompact car might kill me, The pain was so extreme. I was awake most of the night in agony, in tears, suffering badly.
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The next day, suicidal from the extremity of the pain, I called my doctor. It took several hours for her to get back to me. She phoned in an Rx for pain meds and told me to go to the ER, something was very wrong. I got up from the bed to get dressed and my legs were gone.
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It was an extraordinary sensation: I stood, yet felt nothing where my legs should have been. Just the pain, as I collapsed, screaming. I lay on the floor of our bedroom screaming, unable to move. The Wife came running. She called our friend. They couldn't get me up.
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My lower body was gone. Except for the pain. I couldn't stop screaming. EMTs were brutal, treating me as if I were crazy instead of in terrible distress. They complained that the books in the hallway were a fire hazard, threatening us as they threw them down the back stairs.
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They carried me out, naked, on a stretcher, a sheet over me, still screaming in animal pain. At the trauma hospital the doctors said they would have to amputate both legs. They were sure I had compartment syndrome. They stabbed me all over with sharp things I couldn't feel.
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They gave me morphine after about an hour--most likely to get me to stop screaming. They scanned me, got the scans from the first hospital --I had never stopped bleeding. I was bleeding to death, in fact. The clots that had formed in my back and thighs had paralyzed me.
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I told my story over and over to a series of doctors. This trauma hospital was full of gunshot wounds and as a teaching hospital, foreign doctors. The Irish guy with the thick accent gave me the morphine. The African doctor held my hand as he told me about amputations.
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I said I didn't want to lose my legs, I said I was sure I could recover. I told the doctor about a story I'd covered about a young woman who threw herself in front of a train and survived, but lost and arm and a leg. The African doctor said he would try to save my legs.
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He kept testing my pulses and decided he could save my legs. The next 10 days in ICU were terrible. There was a gang attack on my floor one day. I had to file a formal complaint over how patients were being treated. There was little done to prep me for going home paralyzed.
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Fast forward to now, 6yrs later as every scene replays & replays. I should have sued both hospitals,but I was depressed and missed the cut off date. I should have written a book about it,but I was depressed and could only write short stories I was too depressed to send out.
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So I wrote this. For now. I am paralyzed because the first hospital ignored my pain and because one of the drugs I was on had a side effect of paralysis. The irony? Misogynist treatment paralyzed me on #WomensEqualityDay.
That's my trauma anniversary story.
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The trauma hospital typified how little concern there is for Black and brown patients in America. While the ER is high-level, the rest of the hospital is terrible. Peeling paint, square TVs from another era, a revolving nursing staff that was nowhere near enough.
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A young Russian nurse told me repeatedly how much she hated it there and how harsh the conditions were. A Guatemalan nurse told me that I was paralyzed by G-d because I was a lesbian. I had a fight with an attending and had to call the head of the hospital and complain.
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Black and brown patients were being sent out onto the streets because they had no insurance. I could hear them crying because the intercoms were all left open because there weren't enough nurses. That was part of my grievance complaint. (They tried to send me home, too.)
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The attending I fought with was trying to send me to a rehab facility that had no physical therapy. I refused. She tsk tsked me and I told her students if they ever stopped listening to the person in the bed, like she had, to find a new career. That the patient came first.
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None of this should have happened in the US where we pay for the best care. But that care is not open to everyone. And it is often determined by one's zip code. Mine is among the poorest in the city and nearly all Black. We must do better than this for everyone. We must.
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