Diaries

First do no harm

Submitted by Robyn on Fri, 10/02/2015 - 1:34pm

An article published Monday in the Journal of Emergency Nursing will hopefully change the treatment of transgender people in hospital emergency rooms. The article was submitted by Ethan Collin Cicero, BSN, RN and Beth Perry Black, PhD, RN, from Chapel Hill, NC and was entitled, I was a Spectacle...A Freak Show at the Circus: A transgender Person's ED Experience and Implications for Nursing Practice

The article offers a case study for Brandon James (not his real name), a transgender man who visited an Emergency Department in the southeastern US a few years ago, expecting to be treated like any other patient.

Instead, he was treated like a "freak show at the circus" by hospital staff when the female marker on his driver's license and medical record did not match up with his masculine appearance and preference to go by male pronouns.

The authors point to one recent study, which found that about 19 percent of transgender patients reported having been refused care because of their gender status, and 28 percent said they experienced harassment in a medical setting.

Unfortunately, this is fairly common. From a nursing perspective, those are very alarming numbers to learn about, so that's why we wanted to look a little more closely into this community's health care experiences.

--Cicero, a doctoral student at the Duke University School of Nursing

Homecoming

Submitted by Robyn on Thu, 10/01/2015 - 2:05pm

Two weeks ago I posted about a trans teen in Kansas City, Landon Patterson, who was elected to be homecoming queen at Oak Park High School: The difference support makes.

photo landon_zps4gurkopd.jpgSoon after her election, Landon started receiving hate from the Twitterverse.

Everything was such a fairy tale and the world stopped for a minute. People, like, hate me. And now there is a group that hates me, going out of their way to be mean to me.

--Landon

We might have guessed. The folks at Westboro Baptist have decided they need to picket OPHS...and that was on for today. They spout something about landmarks...which I completely don't get.

Do these people not work? How do they go to these protests all over the place? I’ll be working, but Landon knows I’ll be there with her.

--Debbie Hall, Landon's mother

Thursday OT - Where I Get Sidetracked!

Submitted by Shahryar on Thu, 10/01/2015 - 6:00am

yes, I was going to go on a rave about market research and the voodoo involved. Next time! For this one we'll ask the question...

So what good are computers? Have they made our lives better? Am I being a Luddite when I say that before computers people had to know how to spell and how to add? Pre-computers we had J. Edgar Hoover and his goons snooping around, writing reports, getting people blacklisted, blackmailing others. So the world wasn't Eden.

Mr. Potato Head

Submitted by hecate on Thu, 10/01/2015 - 3:37am

Though the French had a series of revolutions, these were never directed against strong governments. Under Louis XIV and XV, they accepted the most outrageous degrees of royal exploitation, waste, arrogance, intolerance, and immorality without a murmur.

Youngstown Steel Strike

Submitted by gjohnsit on Wed, 09/30/2015 - 6:44pm

Youngstown was one of the hubs of the steel industry in 1916.
The mills hummed with activity as they tried to meet the demand from the war in Europe.
The steel unions had been crushed in the 1890's. The shantytown slums on the town outskirts were filled with recent immigrants from eastern Europe who were willing to work in those dangerous jobs with long hours and little pay.

It was a good time to be a capitalist.

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