Straight Female / 34
It Is Such A Problem We Have To Speak Out, Sorry To Ruin Your Day
I was led to this site by one of my patients, a woman of the night.
I work in health care. When I was doing my residency I was deep in the inner city surrounded by homelessness. We had an outreach program but it was essentially ineffective, the homeless were not interested. We were lied to constantly, and absent some physical trauma they never did take advantage of the outreach programs.
But some things do happen. There was this one girl, she wasn't of age. She had been on the run since she was quite young, uneducated and street smart. She had a big mouth and was confrontational from the start. I first met her in the emergency when she came in, or rather was brought in, by an older woman because she had a very infected wound. When we first saw her, we cut away her clothes, and got to the wound itself. It was a knife wound, and it was several days old. But right then when the nurses had exposed the wound for me to examine I was overwhelmed by her smell. It was a gagging odor, and it emanated from her genitals.
The knife wound was problematic, and we had to treat it aggressively. But that could be brought under control, with a long series of antibiotics and oversight at the hospital. But, we had to get to the problem of her other problem, and she was not going to cooperate. In the hospital where we see lots of people who never get medical care, we are not surprised anymore. But a young girl, for some reason, a young girl always tears at my heart. To put it quite bluntly, she had to be restrained for us to get to the source of that problem. She didn't look right, not from the very beginning. The nurse I asked to 'clean' her area, gagged at the odor. After a turn of nurses wiped away months of filth, and cleaned away to get a look at the field, there was a very infected vaginal canal.
She was taken to the OR where a trained OB could examine her fully. What he found was stuffing, which had rotted inside. She had been cut inside, and it had not healed and it was terribly infected, and the OB thought that it may be sepsis that had set in. Advanced sepsis has to be dealt with aggressively, and there was nothing that could be done other than surgically remove the dead and dying flesh of her internal organs.
The woman that brought her in had left once she sat her down in the waiting room. No name, no identity, one of thousands who look alike. The young woman was with us, she could recovered from her knife wound, but not without a significant scar. And a complete hysterectomy was necessary to control her internal infections and sepsis. Her reproductive life was over before it even began.
The social worker at the hospital told me in confidence, because she did not want to talk about it. But this girl had been on their watch list, but when their teams went out she was hidden and not found. She surmised from work she had done south of the border, that her packing was there from a field abortion procedure. And that practice had led to her losing her reproductive ability.
She never did respond to our outreach, after she left the hospital she disappeared again into that community, not to be found. Probably, was the guess, that she had moved to another camp, where she could hide. I spent five years of my residency, and never saw a dent from the social services or any other effort to provide medical care to this community. They had an impenetrable wall. It is hard to say, but they do not want it, they reject it, and inside their community another order exists. To be blunt, we never made a dent, and what was there those years, continues today. This is a society unto itself, it swallows those that enter, and from time to time their bodies are left out to be collected, and once in a great while one finds themselves in the emergency.
My opinion, we have created a monster. The root cause rests with us. We provided the space, we provided the incentives, and now like a cancer it has spread and is uncontrollable. Rest assured, if you have read this far, no amount of money or high minded rhetoric is going to cure this problem. Like that young girl's presentations in emergency, it will have to be treated aggressively and at great cost. If you are brave enough to walk among them, you too will smell the rot that's inside. I'm talking about those that incentivize it, not just those camps and communities.
I work in health care. When I was doing my residency I was deep in the inner city surrounded by homelessness. We had an outreach program but it was essentially ineffective, the homeless were not interested. We were lied to constantly, and absent some physical trauma they never did take advantage of the outreach programs.
But some things do happen. There was this one girl, she wasn't of age. She had been on the run since she was quite young, uneducated and street smart. She had a big mouth and was confrontational from the start. I first met her in the emergency when she came in, or rather was brought in, by an older woman because she had a very infected wound. When we first saw her, we cut away her clothes, and got to the wound itself. It was a knife wound, and it was several days old. But right then when the nurses had exposed the wound for me to examine I was overwhelmed by her smell. It was a gagging odor, and it emanated from her genitals.
The knife wound was problematic, and we had to treat it aggressively. But that could be brought under control, with a long series of antibiotics and oversight at the hospital. But, we had to get to the problem of her other problem, and she was not going to cooperate. In the hospital where we see lots of people who never get medical care, we are not surprised anymore. But a young girl, for some reason, a young girl always tears at my heart. To put it quite bluntly, she had to be restrained for us to get to the source of that problem. She didn't look right, not from the very beginning. The nurse I asked to 'clean' her area, gagged at the odor. After a turn of nurses wiped away months of filth, and cleaned away to get a look at the field, there was a very infected vaginal canal.
She was taken to the OR where a trained OB could examine her fully. What he found was stuffing, which had rotted inside. She had been cut inside, and it had not healed and it was terribly infected, and the OB thought that it may be sepsis that had set in. Advanced sepsis has to be dealt with aggressively, and there was nothing that could be done other than surgically remove the dead and dying flesh of her internal organs.
The woman that brought her in had left once she sat her down in the waiting room. No name, no identity, one of thousands who look alike. The young woman was with us, she could recovered from her knife wound, but not without a significant scar. And a complete hysterectomy was necessary to control her internal infections and sepsis. Her reproductive life was over before it even began.
The social worker at the hospital told me in confidence, because she did not want to talk about it. But this girl had been on their watch list, but when their teams went out she was hidden and not found. She surmised from work she had done south of the border, that her packing was there from a field abortion procedure. And that practice had led to her losing her reproductive ability.
She never did respond to our outreach, after she left the hospital she disappeared again into that community, not to be found. Probably, was the guess, that she had moved to another camp, where she could hide. I spent five years of my residency, and never saw a dent from the social services or any other effort to provide medical care to this community. They had an impenetrable wall. It is hard to say, but they do not want it, they reject it, and inside their community another order exists. To be blunt, we never made a dent, and what was there those years, continues today. This is a society unto itself, it swallows those that enter, and from time to time their bodies are left out to be collected, and once in a great while one finds themselves in the emergency.
My opinion, we have created a monster. The root cause rests with us. We provided the space, we provided the incentives, and now like a cancer it has spread and is uncontrollable. Rest assured, if you have read this far, no amount of money or high minded rhetoric is going to cure this problem. Like that young girl's presentations in emergency, it will have to be treated aggressively and at great cost. If you are brave enough to walk among them, you too will smell the rot that's inside. I'm talking about those that incentivize it, not just those camps and communities.
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