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.

I actually 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 my face, I will go into the ER and they’ll immediately think I’m drug seeking. Any time they need to give me a shot and I have 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 the hospital 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 it?” and I said “Look, I peed myself. Can you get me a johnny, can you get me some scrubs?” He’s like “No, I can’t help you.” And that’s happened to me a few times, having a healthcare provider treat you like crap.”

These aren't even necessarily the worst stories. In one case, they refused to treat an open wound. In another, the woman's boyfriend was lying on a gurney in the hallway having seizures for  an hour and they ignored him. So yeah, this is a problem. And half the time, the reason they got addicted in the first place is because a doctor wrote them a prescription. We'll see what the audience thinks.