Well, here goes. Time to trigger my emotional gag reflex and bring up some old pain.

First off, here’s where we left off yesterday :

1. Contipated after surgery, I suffered for two whole days before the nurses managed to browbeat the meek retarded orderly into very inexpertly giving me my enema
2. Evil nurse made me get up and walk to the other end of the corridor and take a normal, stand up shower despite my fresh stitches and barely being able to stand and with no help from her or the orderlies to get there, rather than give me a sponge bath like they would for patients they considered human
3. I found out by eavesdropping on some orderlies that I got the surgeon who was the joke of the hospital because he was such a fuckup. That explains why I ended up beuing gutted like a fish with a huge scar from my navel to between my nipples and had to spend eight or nine days in the hospital after a routine surgery that would normally require two at most
4. I got mocked openly by a pair of orderlies around 16 hours after surgery.I was too weak and too in pain to even lift my head off the pillow at the time.  Worse, they talked about me like I wasn’t even there. That made fun of my weight.

Great news! It gets worse.

Medications.  I never got mine.

Imagine that. There I was, recovering from surprisingly major surgery,  with all my medications listed on my chart,. IN A FREAKING HOSPITAL. And yet I never got any of my medications. Not my diabetes meds – and that could have killed me. And not my depression and/or anxiety ones either, which might have made me kill myself.

Imagine the state of mind it takes to simply ignore what it says on the chart because the patient is scary and gross and very low status and unable to advocate for themselves and you can totally get away with not bothering.

It was so bad that when I finally told a nurse or nurse-like creature that I needed my diabetes meds, she querelously said “You’re not diabetic!”.

I had to patiently argue her into actually looking at my chart then, after she said “I don’t see that here!”, I had to point at the place where it said I was diabetic, and then allI got from her was her saying “Oh. ” and diappearing.

Pain management.  I didn’t get that either.

Yup. You read that right. I had to recover from being split open by the guy who graduated last in his class completely without pain medication.

I was supposed to be on what was an experimental program at that point where I could push a button on this gizmo and get pain meds via IV every so often.

This experiment was being run by a young woman who was a med student.

She was, of course, terrified of me.

And she had no idea how to administer a butterfly IV. This future doctor pretty much just picked a spot at random and stuck it in, all the while twittering neurotically about how she was “not a nurse” and “a nurse should be doing this” and how she “had no idea what she was doing”.

So why not get a nurse to do it? you might ask.

Because she was too timid to ask. I assume my health and welfare was not sufficient motivation for her.

After all, she wasn’t a nurse!

And the damned thing kept slipping out if I so much as moved a muscle on that hand. so I got to get randomly poked over and over again. In between, more and more medical tape was applied to the problem area in order to hold the damned thing in place until my whole hand looked like it had been gift-wrapped by a toddler.

So I lay there, incredibly depressed and in great pain and with blood sugar doing god knows what, and all because the nurses were scared of me.

You might ask yourself, what kind of person could treat another human being that way?

The answer is simple : the kind who does not see you as a human being.

Oh, and did I mention that I went through all this completely alone?

Visitors. I didn’t get those either.

Well, I got one. A furry named Peace. Someone I considered a friend. He visited me one time for maybe fifteen minutes and he had to bring his father with him to do even that. And the whole time, he was clearly freaking out.

Guess he couldn’t stand to be around me either.

Other than that, nobody. Not a single person. I had lots of friends in the local furry community (that I founded and ran) at the time but none of them came to see me.

But that is always how it is been with me. People are always eager to help me… as long as it costs them absolutely nothing. Not their time, or their effort, or their own money, or even the tiniest of inconveniences or deviations from their usual routines.

In other words, people like to think of themselves as the kind of person who would help a person like me but are perfectly happy doing absolutely nothing to prove it.

Because they would totally help me! If it’s wasn’t for the fact that literally everything else in the world is more important than me.

My only comfort in this is the sure and certain knowledge that when I land in the hospital again, it will NOT got the same way. I am far more self-confident now and my experiences with hospitals since then have made me keenly aware of how people will treat me like dirt there if I let them – maybe tomorrow, I will talk about my experiences with Richmond Hospital’s Adult Outpatients Program – so I would go in prepared to fight for my right to be treated like any other patient.

Almost like I was human!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Especially women. Oh god, the women.

Those of you who know me in the real world know what I look like, but for those who do not, take a gander at this :

I’m this thoughtful looking fellow.

Just another sweapants wearing beardy fat dude, really.

I am also this guy :

What a wild and crazy guy!

Aren’t I adorable?

But what I want you to focus on is that I am a very large man. I am 6’1′ tall and I weigh over 340 pounds. That is a very large quantity of person.

If, ya know, you go by volume.

And most people do. A hell of a lot of assumptions are made about you when you are a large male, and like a lot of hurtful assumptions, they basically boil down to “you must be exactly how you make me feel”.

So people – especially women – are frightened by me and therefore assume I must be scary, aggressive, strong, poiwerful, and very male.

Ergo, the expectations of gender performance for me at set very high. Even if I was just a perfectly normal, healthy, mild-minnered man, I would attract a certqain amount of contempt because I do not match how I look in their eyes.

But I am not normal or healthy. I am weaks and ill and somewhat meek. I fail damned near every male gender performance check and worse, I fail them when my appearance sets the bar so high.

So people – especially women – view me with contempt. Were I am small, slender fellow, I would stimulate nurturing responses and that would counter the contempt.

But I look like I am powerful and strong, and therefore failure toi do so means I am worthy of nothing but scorn and disgust.

Isn’t it funny how if you fail to perform your gender role right and the viewer perceives themselves to be socially superior to you, they blame YOU for not not matching their expectations, and not their expectations themselves?

After all, if someone is socially inferior to you, however they make you feel has to be their fault because otherwise you would have to take the blame when there is a socially inferior person to take it for you.

And that would suggest a social inferior could be right, and therefore in that small way actually superior to you, and that’s just plain crazy talk.

Anyhow, back to gender performance and my lack thereof.

One might think that my homosexuality might enter into the equation, and it does – but probably not how you think.

After all, I don’t “look” gay, whatever that means.

And in a previous era, the moment where people figured out I was gay would have resulted in an even lower gender performance score and quite possibly a downright dangerous level of contempt.

But in these enlightened time, it would actually work in my favour. Gay men are a protected category now, with different expectations of gender performance, and so my being gay would protects me from my lack of gender performance to some extent.

But that only works if they know.

Barring that, people – women especially – view me with contempt, as if I have failed them somehow and it sickens them just to be around me.

I have gotten the eyeroll and disgusted sigh of contempted from nurses, doctors, social workers, teachers, school administrators, other people’s parents, receptionists, telephone surveryors, and even random people on the street.

Can you imagine how soul destroying that is? And most of the time, it’s been women.

And most of the time when it’s been men, it’s been gay men.

Quo est demonstratum. If someone is in the pool of people who is attracted to  your gender, they will judge you quite ruthlessly as to your gender merit.

And that’s fine if it’s just a determination as to whether or not you are attracted to someone. I have my type(s). You have yours. No big whoop.

But it never stops there. People use the same metric to decide your worth as a human being, as if everyone on Earth was only there for your sexual stimulation.

Makes a lot of Trump-type sexism make more sense, doesn’t it?

I have experience direct pain, suffering, and medical harm because of this contempt. When I was in the ROyal Columbian Hospital in New West because my gall bladder went kaboom. my surgery went to the worst surgeon on duty, the nurses found me so gross they would barely enter the room, and the orderlies laughed at me openly when I was far too sick to fight back.

The result was that I suffered a hell of a lot more than I should have. For example, when I was recovering from surgery, I was extremely constipated.

This is not unusual. After all, the anesthetics shut down everything, and sometimes things do not start back up again right away.

Same thing happened with my bladder, too.

In both cases, the remedy is obvious and well known. Enema for the constipation, catheter to the bladder to get that flowing again.

I did not get either for two whole days.

And this, despite telling everyone who came into the room about it. The first nurse I told about it basically went “eep” and disappeared, never to be seen again. After that, nurses would only open the door a crack and peek into my room, presumably to gawk at me like I was a  circus freak.

If I looked in their direction, the door snapped shut like a mnousetrap.

And when I finally got the enema that would ease my pain, it was delivered not by a qualified nurse but by the meekest of the orderlies who clearly extremely did not want to do it and who basiucally did it without looking.

Then there was the supposed nurse who insisted I get out of bed and go get a shower with absolutely no help from her or anyone else because I smelled bad.

Of course I smelled bad. I was very sick. The normal procedure in that case is to give the patient a sponge bath in bed.

But that would have involved touching me, so clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

In fairness, though, there was one nurse – my angel – who had the purity of soul to remember that I was still a human being – or at least a sympathetic animal – whose suffering actually mattered and therefore took care of me when she could.

I wish I knew her name. To me, she is a saint. She is the one who gave me my urinary catheter, she was the one who adjusted my bed when I couldn’t do it myself, and she was the one who actually deigned to tell me when I was being released.

But she was the exeption. For the most part I was treated like low-grade shit.

And why? Because the nurses were scared of and disgusted by me. And that was based entirely on my appearance.

Hmmm. I should write out that whle story sometime soon. It’s quite horrible.

But it would do me a lot of good to get it out of my system.

Maybe I need a nurse to give me an enerma of the soul.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.