Just after I got out of the hospital, I tweeted about how great it was that my medical team was made of such diverse people. Different races, ages, genders, nationalities, sexual orientations, etc. There was an older woman from the Phillipines! There were several people from the Caribbeans! Several more who were Hmong! There was at least one gay woman! There were several Muslim black women! One Taiwanese-American woman like me! It was amazing.
Several months ago, I decided to look up the staff at Regions Hospital. None of the pople I remembered from my time in the hospital were there. Granted, this was over a year-and-a-half later, but still. You would think there would be a few people I remembered. That’s when it hit me. I knew I had had delusions while I was in the hospital. Many, many, many of them. So it should have occurred to me that maybe the diversity I had so welcomed in my hospital experience was…well, not real.
About a month ago, I asked my brother if there were any people of color on my medical team. Please remember I’m in Minnesota. PoC is just under 20%. Which, quite frankly, is a lot more than when I was a kid. But it’s still not much, and you can bet that the diversity goes way down in a specialized job such as nurse or doctor.
My brother said that not one of my team members was a PoC. He said that there may have been one when he wasn’t there, but he hadn’t seen one.
So. All the memories I have of people of color taking care of me? Either didn’t happen at all or I just substituted in PoC because that’s what I wanted to see.
Here are several of the incidents that I remember. One was an elderly female nurse from the Phillipines who reminded me of one of my Taiji classmates and even looked like her a bit. In my mind, anyway. She was very motherly to me and taught doctor-related classes at a college nearby. She brought one of her students (East Asian) to tend to me because it was related to his schoolwork.
Did that really happen? Probably not. Looking back at it, it doesn’t make sense. None of it made sense, but try to tell that to someone who is as high as a kite.
By the way, I am very straightlaced in real life. Idon’t do drugs; I don’t even drink. Now, however, I can see why people do drugs. It was the best feeling in the world. I was flying high and felt no paint. I think it was the second or the third week after I returned home that I realized I actually had a body. And that body was in PAIN. I could see why people got hooked on opiates. They were so fucking good. Anyway. Ahem.