A woman from Toledo, Ohio, sparked outrage over the weekend after she posted a video of herself arguing with a senior resident while hospitalized. The patient says she was simply advocating for herself after becoming concerned about her health, but many viewers felt her behavior towards the resident had been intolerable.
@fadequeen419
I sat on this video for three weeks. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t go out of my way to cause anyone harm. Even in this moment, when my own health wasn’t being treated as a priority, I thought about how sharing this could affect this resident. Maybe he had a rough day. Maybe this isn’t how he treats every patient. But then I thought about all the patients he might treat this way. I’ve seen post after post from people begging for answers while the medical system overlooks their concerns, and watching the Lindsay Clancy case, seeing how often this system fails mothers who are asking for help, struck a nerve. So I’m sharing this for every patient who has been let down by American healthcare. I was admitted for chest pain and high blood pressure and kept overnight for a stress test. During the test, the woman performing it told me plainly: I needed to advocate for myself, because even though my heart looked good, my blood pressure was dangerously high and I needed to be on medication. So that’s exactly what I did. And this is what advocating for your own health in America looks like. At the end of this video is my blood pressure reading, right before the senior resident walked into my room to tell me I had “manipulated and guilt tripped” his resident. All because I asked for blood pressure medication so I wouldn’t go home and have a stroke or a heart attack. I thought about going through the so-called proper channels to inform the hospital. But at this point I have to ask: why didn’t the hospital reach out to me? Four security guards were called and waited outside my door to remove him. Two health care workers walked in to calm the situation down. When do we start holding them accountable for their own checks and balances? I refuse to contact a hospital that didn’t think they should reach out to me first. And I empower anyone who isn’t getting answers to keep advocating for yourself. It is not our job to hold the system accountable. It is about time they start using the millions of dollars they make bankrupting Americans to fix their own broken system. #medicalgaslighting #patientadvocacy #advocateforyourself #patientrights #healthcaresystem…