Hello, my readers. Did you know your brain 🧠 is more powerful than a supercomputer? Wild, right? Anyway, welcome—or welcome back. Grab a seat, get comfy. This month is gonna be interesting…
Today marks the first day of Mental Health Awareness Month, which is all well and good—but I’m here to ask the real question: Where in the hell is the actual change in the medical system itself?
Yeah, awareness exists. That’s great. It’s made some of the general population slightly more tolerant—though, let’s be real, some people still treat mental health like an optional side quest rather than something that literally affects every single aspect of a person’s life. But within the medical system? Different fucking story.
Here’s the lowdown. I have CPTSD with more triggers than I can even keep track of, extreme anxiety, ASD and ADHD (which is becoming known as AuDHD—a delightful contradiction in itself), depression, OCD, and probably something I forgot, because let’s be real, when your diagnoses start looking like a goddamn alphabet soup, sometimes a letter gets lost in the mix.
Now, here’s the kicker: I face more discrimination based on my mental health than I do based on my race—which says a fucking lot considering I’m First Nations and we deal with more bullshit in medical settings than most people can even fathom. But medical discrimination against those with mental health conditions? It’s dangerous as hell—and not just for the patients.
Because let’s get one thing straight: Bias makes doctors blind. And blind doctors make lethal decisions.
Already feeling a little uncomfortable reading this? Good. Because this is barely scratching the surface. This isn’t just about bad bedside manners or medical professionals needing some sensitivity training. No. This is about life-threatening negligence, blatant discrimination, and a system that continues to allow it.
Let’s dig in.
Let’s talk about bias in the medical system.
Not the quiet, subtle kind that makes people tilt their heads and say something condescending like, “Well, you don’t look sick.” No. We’re talking about the kind that turns mental health struggles into ammunition against the very people who need care the most.
Because make no fucking mistake—when doctors weaponize mental health against their patients, it isn’t just ignorant. It isn’t just unfair. It’s fucking dangerous.
I know this because I lived it.
There I was, curled up on a hospital gurney, shaking from pain so severe I could barely breathe, tears streaking down my face, unable to eat, barely able to drink even eight goddamn ounces of water in a day because every swallow felt like a knife through my body. I was in so much fucking pain I was begging for a feeding tube—not because I wanted it, but because I knew I wouldn’t survive without something forcing nutrition into me.
And what did that doctor—this excuse for a medical professional—do?
She dismissed me. Mocked me. Let me suffer.
She saw the diagnoses: CPTSD. ASD. AuDHD. Anxiety. Depression. OCD. She saw the list and instead of using her brain to treat the actual medical emergency in front of her, she twisted that list into a weapon.
She rolled her eyes at autism.
She ignored my pain.
She refused a chaperone, which is legally required when requested—because she knew exactly what the fuck she was doing.
She called security.
And if you think that’s the worst of it—think again.
As I struggled, barely able to move, she opened her mouth and let one of the most vile racist slurs spill out like it was nothing. She thought I wouldn’t hear it.
But I did.
A fucking slur that has been used against Indigenous people for generations, a word meant to dehumanize, to reduce, to crush dignity beneath boots that were never meant to walk beside us—only over us.
I am First Nations. I am a woman. I am autistic. I have mental health struggles. And this doctor saw every single one of those things as reasons to invalidate me, discredit me, and strip away my humanity.
That’s not just negligence.
That’s weaponized bias.
That’s evil.
And the worst part? She isn’t the only one.
This happens every goddamn day in emergency rooms, urgent care, walk-in clinics. This isn’t just my fight—it’s our fight.
So tell me—where the hell is the change?
Let’s start from Day One.
This wasn’t just a bad ER visit. This wasn’t just one incompetent doctor making an oopsie and sending me home too early. This was malicious. And if you think I’m exaggerating, buckle the hell up—because this is the kind of thing people don’t believe until they live it.
My GERD had been flaring up like a goddamn wildfire for months, to the point where I was barely able to eat solid food most days. And trust me, downing meal replacement drinks like Boost every single day gets real fucking old, real fast—especially when even that shit burns on the way down. But it was better than starving, so I tolerated it.
Except I was starving.
I should have been sent for a scope months ago. Should have had answers, should have had basic goddamn medical care. But nope—instead it get’s so bad, I walked into the ER, needing urgent intervention, only to end up with the worst kind of doctor imaginable.
Let’s set the scene:
I sit in the waiting room for TWELVE HOURS—curled up, shaking, crying from pain, barely functioning, watching the clock tick away while my body deteriorates even further.
Finally, I get a bed.
I wait. Again. Hours pass. I hear the doctor on the unit multiple times, walking around, doing other rounds. My pain is so fucking bad I’m curled up in the center of the gurney, shaking, tears streaking down my face, barely able to breathe through it. Nurses are whispering about how long I’ve been sitting here in agony without seeing a doctor.
I am so dehydrated from the inability to eat or drink that ER protocols kick in automatically—bloodwork orders, IV line orders. You know, the typical “uh-oh, this patient is fucked” procedures.
And then she walks in.
Have you ever met someone and instantly had the hair on the back of your neck stand up? That weird instinct, the one that warns you, “This person is about to make my life hell?”
That was her.
I start explaining. She listens—barely. She asks about my conditions. I mention ASD—and immediately, I see it. The eye roll.
Through my fucking tears, I see it.
Oh. Oh, I’m screwed.
This woman is already biased against me, already discrediting me in her head before she even hears the whole story. And I am too sick, too exhausted, too drowning in pain to fight back properly.
She asks me what I think she can do about it.
Excuse the fuck out of me. Are you or are you not the doctor?
But fine, whatever. I still have one last ounce of fight left in me. I give her a goal: Help me survive long enough to figure out what’s actually wrong. Keep me fed. Keep me hydrated. Because if I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t drink, I was not going to last much longer like this.
My suggestion? A feeding tube. Any kind. I didn’t care. I just needed something that could bypass the fire raging in my throat and stomach. Something to keep me alive.
But nope. She wasn’t done wrecking me yet.
She decides to start with pain meds—except instead of actually helping, she pulls the absolute weakest bullshit imaginable and gives me Tylenol.
TYLENOL.
Like I hadn’t already been choking back far stronger then Tylenol at home, like that was going to magically fix the fact that I couldn’t even fucking eat.
Except—here’s the kicker.
I was already prescribed hydromorphone, T4, and TWO daily GERD medications to control the goddamn symptoms that had been ruining my ability to eat for months.
And she thought fucking Tylenol was the answer?
What next? Slap a Band-Aid on say, internal bleeding and call it a day?
And THEN—she says she wants psych to come assess me.
What the fuck does my mental health have to do with my body failing?
No, seriously—what the hell does PTSD or autism or ADHD have to do with the fact that I can’t fucking eat?
Oh wait—I know. She was trying to invalidate my pain. Trying to twist my diagnoses into an excuse to ignore me.
That’s when I demanded a chaperone—because legally, in Alberta, if a patient asks for one, a doctor has no choice but to comply.
Now, let’s be real—most of the time, just requesting a chaperone is enough to make a doctor straighten their shit out. The moment they know someone else is watching, suddenly they remember how to act like an actual medical professional instead of a condescending jackass.
Most of the time.
But not her.
She ignored the request outright.
Which means, legally, she was in the wrong.
And it only got worse.
Let’s talk about the IV nightmare.
By this point, my body was so unbelievably dehydrated that multiple failed IV attempts left nurses scrambling to find a vein that wouldn’t collapse the moment they touched it.
It was so bad that they finally had to call down an ICU nurse to get a line started, because regular ER nurses couldn’t get one in.
They finally got a line in the top of my fucking foot—which, if you’ve never had that done before, congratulations, because it fucking sucks.
By this point, I should have already been admitted. Already been treated as a severe case.
Instead?
I had a doctor who looked at me, saw my diagnoses, saw my heritage, and decided my suffering wasn’t real.
And we’re still not done exposing this nightmare. We have only started.
I should have been monitored.
I should have been admitted.
I should have been treated like a human being.
Instead?
I was humiliated, discarded, and told in every possible way that my suffering didn’t matter.
And that’s when she pulled her final, most violent play.
She called security.
I heard her through the curtain—her twisting my behavior, painting me as aggressive, making it sound like I was unstable, like I was being a problem instead of a patient in medical crisis.
And in that haze of exhaustion, pain, and degradation—I heard it.
Chug.
The word cut straight through me, through my weakness, through my body failing, through the absolute despair pressing into every breath.
A slur.
A dehumanizing, vicious slur thrown in my direction because she thought I wouldn’t hear it.
She thought I was too out of it to register what she had just done.
But I did.
And in that moment, the sickness of it was unbearable.
At this point, other patients around me started to pipe up.
I had been making enough noise—had been in agony for hours, long enough for people to witness what was happening—and now? I wasn’t alone in this anymore.
Even through my haze of pain, even though I couldn’t use that attention to fight properly in the moment—it was there.
And then, through all of it—the exhaustion, the degradation, the raw devastation—I saw a familiar face.
One of the security guards—someone who knew me, someone who had seen me around for years, someone who had watched me in my worst moments of grief, of loss, of breathlessly wandering this hospital because it’s the same damn place my daughter died—popped their head in.
And I looked up, barely holding on, and forced myself to say:
“I am getting ready as fast as I can. I want my dignity. Please don’t make it obvious you’re escorting me out.”
That was the only mercy granted—the smallest shred of humanity left in that moment.
But they weren’t happy.
Because they knew me.
And they knew this was bullshit.
I could see it—the shake of their head, the anger suppressed under professional obligation, the recognition that this wasn’t right.
But there was nothing they could do.
And then—she went for the final blow.
Despite knowing my mobility struggles, despite knowing my wheelchair was in for repairs, despite knowing I physically couldn’t walk far without collapsing, she scoffed and said:
“She’s making it up. She can walk her ass out those doors. She’s lying.”
Excuse the fuck out of me?
So now we’re pretending every medical professional, every mobility aid specialist, every assessment I’ve ever had was lying too?
At this point, even the other patients started speaking up.
I had been in agony for hours, long enough for people to see this play out, long enough for people to hear the mockery, and now? I wasn’t alone in it anymore.
But I had nothing left to fight with.
So I did the only thing I could.
I tried to stand.
I tried to move with dignity.
I made it maybe twelve feet—just barely past the security guards—before my body gave in completely.
And instead of following protocol, instead of getting nurses to assess me, instead of handling a medical fall in a hospital properly—
She got in my face.
And she said:
“Quit faking it.”
I wasn’t faking.
I was falling apart in real-time.
I was so far beyond the breaking point that I could barely breathe, my body was shutting down, and she had the audacity to gaslight me even further.
And then?
She did something else—something that should never, under any circumstances, happen in a medical setting.
She started revealing my medical information to the security guards.
That? Is a major violation.
That is a breach of patient confidentiality, a complete disregard for ethical medical practice, a blatant overstep of her role as a physician.
And in that moment, as I lay there humiliated on the floor, stripped of dignity and truth, she kept violating every single boundary that should have protected me.
And I snapped.
I wasn’t just exhausted anymore.
I wasn’t just devastated.
I was in survival mode now.
So I forced out the strongest response I had left:
“Step back, lady. As far as I’m concerned, you are an imminent threat to my safety, and I will act as such.”
And it worked.
One of the security guards—someone who saw where this was heading, someone who knew just how bad it would get if she kept going, she had helped cops with the last dr who had me say those words as she was a witness then and amused that this 5’3″ woman had that much hidden force behind a calm exterior—stepped in, pulled her back, and said, “This is our job. Not yours.”
She didn’t catch the sneer in their voice, didn’t catch the restrained venom, but I did.
Even through all that pain, all that mental chaos, all that devastation—I caught it.
And finally?
I was granted a wheelchair by my favorite night security guard while watching the two guards scowl at the doctor. It is never a good idea to piss of those you rely on for protection and if I could see it in the state I was in, they were not hiding it at all. I bet if this Doctor who got her license from a cereal box could have she would have called for different guards because every single medical professional who agreed this was fucked never did come back not even my assigned nurses.
I pushed myself into it, wheeled myself out, made sure someone would retrieve it, made sure I wouldn’t be charged with theft, because my brain? It wasn’t right anymore.
Honestly, I was probably in shock.
And less than a week and a half later, I finally got my scope.
And what did they find?
Ulcers covering my stomach so badly they could barely see the stomach lining.
A severe infection.
Such extreme dehydration that they had to bring in specialists to get an IV line started—and if that failed, they were prepping for a PICC line or a central line.
I ended up admitted.
I ended up hooked up to TPN—a fucking IV nutrition bag—because my body had been pushed so far past its limits that it needed nutrients pumped directly into my bloodstream.
And all I could think was:
This should never have happened.
And yet?
Here we fucking are.
The scary part, that is the short of the long story there. I will probably do the entire one this month at some point. This is true, as hard as it is to believe, it happened and was if anything worse then what I am saying because it is hard to think of this stuff.
Who am I? 
I would love to hear from you!