I would slip out of the back doors of my medical school into the back doors of our cancer hospital for my after hours infusions. I would always carry the ID bracelet, so I wouldn't forget to take it off. I was thin. It was seen as fashionable.
Shekinah Elmore, MD, MPH
8,612 posts
Shekinah Elmore, MD, MPH
@pre_rad
- Here's the thing. As a Black medical student and resident, I have saved Black patients lives when this would not have happened otherwise. I am deeply troubled that it's true. But it is true. The stories I could tell you.
- It will always be the (white) public health nutrition people. Like my sworn enemies since MPH times. An apple a day does not keep the doctor away when access to both apples and doctors are shaped by structural racism.
- Replying to @pre_radIt was hard for me to hide in plain sight. But I wanted to be treated like a full human being, and I saw how my profession treats people with cancer. Black people with cancer. How the world does. And, he didn't owe us a whisper about his illness.
- Replying to @pre_radHe seemed like someone who did what he loved for as long as he was able in a world that remains unfair in a million ways. I'm deep in the collective grief. And thinking of his family.
- No one: Me: Are doctors the worst patients or is it just weird for you to take care of someone without the tremendous information asymmetry and power differential who may be able to exercise their agency more definitively? 🤔
- I'm not good with the way that clinicians are posting about patients that they work with on their social media. I'm sure there are very specific situations when it's ethically OK. I usually find it deeply troubling. I don't want to recognize myself on my clinician's social media.
- When I was a medical student I eventually just had to say "I'm going to leave now" because after trying the "anything else I can help with" and even the "when is a good time for me to end for the day" I would be there until 9pm with an expectation to be back at 3:30am. MS3.
- Advice for the next time I guess? When someone calls you a "hero," or a group of people "heroes," it's usually a setup for profound, intentional neglect. Heroes aren't human. They don't need care, understanding, safety, meal breaks. They don't have boundaries. They can be used.
- Replying to @pre_radI cannot be the Black doctor for every Black patient. And the reason that a Black patient survives should not be because they have a Black doctor. And there should be many, many more Black doctors simply as an end in and of itself. It isn't utilitarian, some "diversity" goal.
- #DNRTulane To #MedTwitter - If Dr. Dennar's story isn't immediately recognizable to you, it means that 1) you don't actually know any Black people well enough to be trusted with our stories and 2) you don't actually know yourselves or your own healthcare systems.
- I didn't properly estimate how much of adult life is just saying "Yikes" in your head and then figuring out if you also need to say it out loud.
- Replying to @pre_radAnd this, in an of itself, doesn't make me an exceptional doctor. It makes me a Black doctor in an exceptionally anti-Black system. I resent it deeply every time. Particularly the fact that there is really so little that I can do.
- Replying to @pre_radBut it is what it is, for now. And what it is, for now, is a healthcare system where a Black doctor, a Black medical team, can actually be the reason that a Black patient survives.