the following is an anonymous member reflection
Having a rough day at work and wanted to share a small victory I had thanks to — and a moment that made it clear to me once again, why we need universal health care and so much more…
**The only trauma talked about below is related to the awfulness of a system that puts profit over people, I don’t talk about intimate partner abuse explicitly.**
I work as a domestic violence counselor in a hospital, so I go to work, and am never quite sure what I’m walking into that day (like many of you also face). Today I was asked to go speak with a woman who had just given birth a couple days ago, and who the nurses believed was suffering from postpartum depression as a result of domestic violence. I went to talk to her using a phone interpreter since the woman was Haitian and spoke French Creole. Soon after talking to her, it became clear that she was not experiencing domestic violence, and was definitely not suffering from mental illness. Even though I’m supposed to stop talking to someone after I realize they aren’t experiencing domestic violence, I stayed and listened because my human rights/health justice antennae were going off. She was definitely in a stressful situation, which was only being made worse by the hospital. She is uninsured, but before going to the hospital to give birth to her child she was told that she would definitely not be charged anything, that she would not see a bill. But people at the hospital kept giving her conflicting information and she was given a bill without any explanation of what financial assistance was available to her. I explained Emergency Medicaid to her, and that it was likely she would qualify for that, and I told her she may need to ask and demand to get an application. I also told her that although people at the hospital keep treating her as though she is a bad mother and “crazy,” she is reacting completely normally to the situation she is in. I told her over and over that she wasn’t crazy, and by the end of the conversation we were able to laugh together at the absurdity of the way people were treating her, and basically the absurdity of the US health system. She told me she felt much better, and was surprised that someone who was much younger than everyone else she had spoken with that day was able to provide her with some relief. It made me angry/sad that there are people who are deeply affected by this messed up health system, and then the health system turns around and blames them for it by diagnosing them with a “mental illness” to dismiss the reality of how traumatizing the system itself can be.
So…I was channeling my PPF community so hard in that room today. Thank you all. I don’t know what I would have done without you. I was able to help someone feel a little less crazed in this absurdity of a system thanks to you all.
Love you all <3