My belated blogging aganist Disablism Entry….
Published by Amy under Disability Stuff, Medical School on April 18, 2007Psych is going to eat me. Seriously… THERE IS SO MUCH I DON”T KNOW!!!
And I leave you with this…
Classmate: So your friend who is speaking, she is in a wheelchair?
Me: Yep
Classmate: What’s wrong with her?
Me: She was in a car accident, she has limited use of one side of body, hemiplegia of sorts.
Classmate: But she’s in med school right?
Me: Yes at Duke.
Classmate: But how will she be a doctor? How can she examine a patient on a table?
Me: She needs a exam table that can be lowered?
Classmate: Oh. Well um…don’t be offended, but who would want someone like that as their doctor? I mean what happens when she gets in the real world?
Me: You would be suprised how many people find it oddly comforting to have someone who has been on the other side as their doctor. I would trust her as my doctor. I suppose some people won’t but thats their lost. I suppose I will deal with the same thing.
Classmate: See you don’t bother me so much, you aren’t really disabled. You can walk and you aren’t blind and you can hear normal and stuff.
Me: Well there is a spectrum of disabilities.
Classmate: See I see it as there are disabled people who can’t really do stuff and function and then normal people who can do stuff and you do stuff.
Me: interesting…so classes of pscyostimulants?
I’m not disabled…who knew?
yay future doctors. Go team.
See, I can understand when most stupid people say stuff like that, but the Future Doctors of America? How does this kind of stupid not come out in an interview? “Hi, I’ll be you’re doctor today. It seems you’re one of those disabled people what can’t do stuff good.” Who is this jackass, Zoolander?
It’s a real shame in such situations we can’t say “I’d rather have ’someone like that’ as my doctor than ’someone like you’,” isn’t it.
And. . . one of the first points I’m making in the thing I’m writing up for my prof is that med school keeps telling us we don’t exist. And giving her enough examples hopefully she’ll believe I mean it LITERALLY!
To the above commenter - in my experience, these things aren’t problematic in interviews because the vast majority of the interviewers believe the same things themselves. It’s a vicious cycle.
“See, you don’t bother me much”…
What the F?
I’ll tell you what…when it comes to choosing a Dr, I would take almost anyone over your friend there.
Rachel and I are going to kick this kid’s ass.
Please tell me that didn’t really happen.
That reminds me of a speaker we had come to class who talked about how she wished she could forcibly hospitalize her bipolar patients because she felt they sometimes made poor purchasing decisions. If only people came with labels on their foreheads that said “normal” or “diseased” so we could more effectively objectify the abnormals among us.
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