The endless loop, something so frustrating with American medical Care. When a patient starts to have concerning acute symptoms or a Major flair up and presents to their primary Care or outpatient specialist depending on the symptoms they will be told to seek emergency attention at a local emergency department.
This is often unfortunately a traumatic experience if you are of the chronically ill variety, as the emergency departments like to call us "frequent flyers". They like to put us in with that bunch of people that come in for frequent overdoses, social and poverty issues, frequent mental health concerns, or a snack and warm blanket. However one of the major differences here, is we are often told to come in and have the potential of very negative medical consequences or even death if we do not listen to our care teams advice. To an emergency department a frequent flyer is a frequent flyer, they don't like to see a familiar face. You can feel the tension, you can hear the bantering and laughter and jokes about you just around the corner from the nurses sometimes it's like they would never read your chart.
The times I've been to the emergency department and get a kind team and don't hear people making fun of me I feel such a large amount of relief and that's not how things should be. As somebody who has autism, and trauma these behaviors from emergency department staff cause more damage on top of the physical health problems at hand. We shouldn't be begging for the bare minimum.
By the time you leave it's without answers with persisting severe symptoms, and no relief. Usually you're diagnosed with something strange that had nothing to do with why you came in or just told it was anxiety. So you go home and you try your best to cope. Usually you'll hear "follow up with your primary care tomorrow" or another specialist depending on what you went in for.
As time goes on things get worse so you call your doctor again to follow up, since that's what the emergency department told you to do, only to be told to go back to the emergency department and so the loop is made.
I often choose to break the loop and I don't end up going back in, I let the problems either resolve or fester and I suffer. It's a living nightmare that I wish on nobody and I truly wish that these doctors understood why we don't want to go to the emergency department. I wish the emergency department staff understood why we are being sent to begin with and that it's not our fault we are coming in. we don't choose illness, we are trying to be good patients and stereotyping us helps nothing.
There was a time I had a doctor tell me not to come in for anything regarding chronic illness, even if it was something life-threatening as "they don't deal with chronic illness management". To me that seems like eugenics, they don't want to take care of you if you have a pre-existing condition you're looked at as a burden on not only the hospital but also society. Treating patients like this puts our lives at risk and there are some providers that are intentionally doing that, when I brought this situation up to the hospital they did an internal investigation and decided that it didn't happen. My primary care doctor was extremely upset with this, as she told me to go in that night and is well aware it's related to a chronic illness.
Sometimes I believe there is something deeper and sinister going on with some, not all health care providers. I know I didn't do anything to deserve the way they treat me and I heard this same story time and time again from people with provable, tangible illness. I've even heard the horror stories of people dying from this type of treatment. When is it going to stop? When are we going to end the loop, when are we going to be a genuinely cared for minority. Disabled and chronically ill people matter more than just being used for inspiration porn, or being the sad story in a movie, or the kid you take to prom for brownie points. We have lives, relationships, thoughts, feelings, hobbies, goals, dreams, hopes, fears and want to live... we are human.
End the loop.