Hola. I'm Megan. Im 22. I'm a complex personality. I'm not the type to follow. I do what I want because I want to. I am a photographer, complete nerd and school activist. I graduated SUNY Purchase in May 2016. I was a double major in LIterature and Theatre. If I could describe myself in one word it would be AWESOME. Lol no it would be RARE. On the outside I make look like everyone else but that is far from true. You just have to get to know me to find out. That's all folks :)
Since once in a blue moon I actually discover a decent rule for adulting, and since I know I have followers a few years younger than me who are just entering the workforce, I want to tell you about a very important phrase.
“I won’t be available.”
Imagine you’re at work and your boss asks you to come in on Saturday. Saturday is usually your day off–coming in Saturdays is not an obligation to keep your job. Maybe you were going to watch a movie with a friend, or maybe you were just going to lie in bed and eat ice cream for eight hours, but either way you really, really don’t want to give up your day off.
If you consider yourself a millennial you’ve probably been raised to believe you need to justify not being constantly at work. And if you’re a gen-Z kid you’re likely getting the same toxic messages that we did. So in a situation like that, you might be inclined to do one of three things:
Tell your boss you’d rather not give up your day off. Cave when they pressure you to come in anyway, since you’re not doing anything important.
Tell your boss you’d rather not give up your day off. Over-apologize and worry that you looked bad/unprofessional.
Lie and say you’ve got a doctor’s appointment or some other activity that feels like an adequate justification for not working.
The fact is, it doesn’t matter to your boss whether you’re having open heart surgery or watching anime in your underwear on Saturday. The only thing that affects them is the fact that you won’t be at work. So telling them why you won’t be at work only gives them reason to try and pressure you to come in anyway.
If you say “I won’t be available,” giving no further information, you’d be surprised how often that’s enough. Be polite and sympathetic in your tone, maybe even say “sorry, but I won’t be available.” But don’t make an excuse. If your boss is a professional individual, they’ll accept that as a ‘no’ and try to find someone else.
But bosses aren’t always professional. Sometimes they’re whiny little tyrants. So, what if they pressure you further? The answer is–politely and sympathetically give them no further information.
“Are you sure you’re not available?” “Sorry, but yes.”
“Why won’t you be available?” “I have a prior commitment.” (Which you do, even if it’s only to yourself.)
“What’s your prior commitment?” “Sorry, but that’s kind of personal.”
“Can you reschedule it?” “I’m afraid not. Maybe someone else can come in?”
If you don’t give them anything to work with, they can’t pressure you into going beyond your obligations as an employee. And when they realize that, they’ll also realize they have to find someone else to come in and move on.
IMPORTANT!! PLEASE READ!!
Just like with many other parts of life, learn to say ‘no’ to people. You are important. Don’t kill yourself for another person, esp. if they are your boss.
I mean it. You’re getting the attention you think you want, all eyes on you. Except ours.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Your fellow waiters ask us, concerned. Behind the triage window, you can’t hear our teeth grinding.
You’re in pain, i understand that. This might even be the worst pain you’ve ever felt.
But you’re probably not dying.
Dying isn’t loud.
A patient having a heart attack does not scream and thrash and gasp for air. It’s a whisper, a tightness, with slow flexing fingers.
A stroke happens in a fraction of an instant, and never makes any sound. More whispers, halves of sentences and muscles that don’t quite match up anymore, a puppet with a few of the strings cut. Alarmed and wandering eyes, maybe, but never yelling.
Or the more common killers, infections that shut down organs or the pipes of blood that sever. Cardiac or respiratory failure. If a person can talk they are, in fact, breathing just fine.
Remember this, the next time you come to an emergency department. Remember this when you’re sitting in the waiting room, while a sleepy-looking person in a wheelchair is whisked away without a word.
I’ve been on both sides of the fence on this one. Working in the ER and being a patient. And the fact of the matter is no one can really tell how much pain you feel. One day I got brought into the ER in an ambulance with abdominal pain. I’m an EMT mind you, I hate going to the ER unless I have to. Felt like something from the Aliens movies was trying to get out of my stomach. Got assessed in triage and the pain passed. And then It came back with a vengence. Honest to God 10 out of 10. And I tried to be civil and ask the nurses if I could get moved back just so I could get something for the pain. I got the eye roll, the looks of disbelief, and told to wait. I tried walking away, my knees gave out and I landed on all fours. In the ER. And I screamed. It was the worst pain ever. They tried to put me back in a wheelchair. The movement made the pain worse. It wasn’t until the charge nurse said that I was making a scene that they took me back to an exam room. I sat there for 5 minutes waiting on my nurse. It got hard to breath. It took another 5 minutes for them to get me pain killers and an x-ray. My entire upper abdomen from my diaphragm to my belly button was full of air. My stomach had ruptured and was leaking into all of my abdomen. I was rushed to emergency abdominal surgery and was going into shock when I made it to the OR. 5 more minutes and I would have been dead. I tried to “suffer in silence and with dignity”. It almost got me killed. You don’t get to decide if people are in pain or not just by looking at them. You’re human. Not a CT scanner.
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I rear ended a car at 16 and slammed on breaks & ended up shattering EVERY bone in my right foot & snapping my ankle in half. Later, the specialists said it was the worst foot break they have ever seen. When the ambulance dropped me off at the hospital, strapped to a stretcher, they wheeled me into the break room and left me there for 30 minutes.
They left a child in the nurses break room for 30 minutes with no explanation. Just wheeled me in there and left me crying my eyes out surrounded by people playing angry birds on their phones.
When I finally saw a nurse she gave me TYLENOL and told me to go home with my mom because my foot was “a little swollen”. They wrapped it in gauze. They were mad because I was making so much noise but my foot literally felt like it was on fire.
YOU CANNOT DECIDE HOW MUCH PAIN SOMEONE IS IN!!!!
Seriously, it’s shitty shitty shitty attitudes like OP’s that make me terrified of ever having to go to the ER.
Y'all have a hard job, I know and appreciate that, but y'all can also be jaded, heartless sons of bitches and it’s seriously ill and suffering patients who pick up the tab on that.
i have lifelong psychological trauma from being left waiting four hours with unbearable abdominal pain when i was eleven or so.
four hours.
someone prodded at my stomach and decided that since the pain wasn’t in the right place to be a ruptured appendix, it was just gas. after that, the only nurses who even came near me only came to tell me to be quiet.
my parents begged for someone, anyone, to listen – he never cries, they said, he never whines, i’ve never heard him make this noise before, something is really really wrong! this kid fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone and got up laughing! when he stepped on broken glass he just said ‘uh i guess you better fetch a towel’! jesse does not scream, please someone at least try to find out what’s wrong, isn’t this a hospital?
all anyone said was, kids make such a fuss. stop being dramatic.
meanwhile, i was entering an altered state from the unrelenting pain, hallucinating and giggling through my sobs, having mini blackouts. i bit clean through a paperback book before someone finally came around to take me to x-ray “though i’m sure we won’t find anything.” the x-ray technician snapped “you don’t need that” and snatched my teddy bear, tossing it on a counter, where it would’ve been left behind if my mother hadn’t noticed me coming out of the room without it (they didn’t let her come in with me) and gone charging in to get it.
more waiting, because x-rays took time to develop back then. more contempt and cold shoulders, and me wondering if i could maybe walk just enough to get out to the highway and dive in front of a semi, because hell cannot be any worse than this.
and then suddenly, here’s a doctor who is in a huge hurry and we are going to give me a great big enema right fucking now because the x-ray found a bowel obstruction as hard as stone and my intestines are going to rupture any second! hurry hurry, don’t you know how high the fatality rate is for sepsis from a ruptured bowel? terrified eleven year old, dehydrated and seeing double and too weak to stand, gets what feels like a garden hose full of lava shoved up his butt, and then they point me at a toilet and leave me there.
result: child on the floor, erupting from both ends. nurse’s reaction: anger and disgust.
pretty much everything from the x-ray on, i remember as if i was watching myself on tv. by the time they left me in the bathroom i wasn’t crying anymore. i was just sort of… nearby, while things happened to my body. i wondered if my bowel was still in danger of rupturing, but i couldn’t find it in me to care.
i was finally quiet.
maybe at that point OP would’ve condescended to notice me.
Folk wisdom about who needs the real help works and sounds good ninety percent of the time but when psychiatric pts die on the floor in your waiting rooms from a fatal case of non standard presentation complicated by acute jaded power trip it’s still malpractice
Ps head injuries for sure never cause a person to be altered and act like nothing serious is going on
op, it’s attitudes like yours in the world of medicine that need changing, not how our patients “should” present when they come to us for help.
OP is heartless.
People’s pain tolerances are different. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity.
That article is specific to how female pain is minimized (usually as hysteria). It’s even worse if you’re a WOC.
Look at what happened to Serena Williams. Greatest tennis player of all time, nearly dies in childbirth because doctors don’t want to listen to her that something is not right. Probably the only reason she is alive is because she is who she is.
There are some people who are in such chronic habitual pain that their reference point for pain doesn’t even make sense to someone not in their condition. Their resigned “I don’t know…five?” Could be someone else’s screaming 10.
Also thinking of my SIL’s father who frankly was killed by malpractice. Poor man was in screaming pain when they ignored protocol to change his catheter and they said he was faking it. He went septic because they fucked it up.
Reading the stories on this post is horrifically sad. Shame on the original poster. SHAME. Get a different fucking job.
If you go to the ER, cry and scream as loud as you need to. If anything, it might make the staff like OP see to you faster just to get you to shut up.
The only reason I didn’t permanently lose my sight is because I made a scene.
Imagine little 15 years old me, who never needed glasses or had any type of problem with their sight, suddently starting to get random headaches, pain behind their right eye, and see blurry. I went to the ER the first time when I could hardly see from said eye, and after two hours a nurse sent me back home saying that it was “just stress” and to “sleep it off”.
A week later my parents rushed me to the ER because the pain was so unbearable that I had bursted out crying during class. They explained the situation to a nurse and guess what? I was left waiting for another two hours.
I had no idea what was happening. I felt like my head was exploding, and at that point I could only see white from my right eye. After those two hours, which I spent sitting quietly with tears running down my face because the nurse had told me not to disturb the other people waiting, I noticed that my vision was going completely white.
And I freaked out.
I started wailing, sobbing my eyes out and screaming “I can’t see! I CAN’T SEE!!” while pressing the heels of both hands against my eyes because that was the only thing that made the pressure behind them more bearable.
That seemed to catch the nurses’ attention: a 15 years old kid in full blown panic attack screaming bloody murder because they had gone completely blind.
After that I was visited pretty quickly, and ended up spending almost a month in the neurology department because the optic nerve of my right eye had completely shut down. The doctor that followed me was horrified when she found out that I had spent a week walking around while my eye was in that condition. Had I been hospitalized a week before a lot of problems could have been prevented.
End result? I managed to get my vision back (though they never figured out what exactly caused the loss), but my optic nerve is permanently damaged and the tiniest stress makes my vision go blurry. I also have problems with my color perception and still get random pain.
So yes, cry and scream as loud as you need to. Force them to notice you.
“14-year-old Parkview High School Freshman, Caleb Christian was concerned about the number of incidents of police abuse in the news. Still, he knew there were many good police officers in various communities, but had no way of figuring out which communities were highly rated and which were not.
So, together with his two older sisters: Parkview High School senior Ima Christian, and Gwinnett School of Math, Science, and Technology sophomore, Asha Christian, they founded a mobile app development company– Pinetart Inc., under which they created a mobile app called Five-O. Five-O, allows citizens to enter the details of every interaction with a police officer. It also allows them to rate that officer in terms of courtesy and professionalism and provides the ability to enter a short description of what transpired. These details are captured for every county in the United States. Citizen race and age information data is also captured.
Additionally, Five-O allows citizens to store the details of each encounter with law enforcement; this provides convenient access to critical information needed for legal action or commendation.”
🌕Take a glass of white wine out beneath the full moon. Set your intention, let the moonlight charge the glass, drink it down and fill yourself with the energy of the full moon.
🌑During the new moon substitue for red wine. Focus on yourself, strengthen your heart on the darkest nights.
🕯️Honor or welcome the sun by lighting a candle in your home (you can do a fake candle if you’re not allowed to light a real candle). If you really want to go all out, you can light every single fake and real candle in your house! 🕯️Get crafty! Make candles, Brighid’s Crosses, Brighid dolls, sun catchers, or start building a garden. Imbolc is a great time to plant seeds (unless it’s too cold outside; indoor gardens are always an option)! 🕯️Decorate your altar and/or home with crystals, flowers, stones, candles, images of the sun, or any other decor that celebrates the coming spring! 🕯️Divine your future! Get out your tarot cards, pendulum, dowsing rod, bones, or other divining tools and ask for advice or insight into the future. 🕯️Take care of yourself and your home! Do some spring cleaning and cleansing and take time for yourself. Take a bath, clean off your desk, do some easy cleaning or deep cleaning, whatever you prefer. This is a great time for cleansing and purification! 🕯️Cook and share with friends and family! Pies, cookies, bread, whatever you want. If you have the energy, you can cook a feast and celebrate with your loved ones, including deceased loved ones. 🕯️Visit a lake, stream, well, or another body of water. If you want to, dip a ribbon in the body of water and then hang it on a tree (remember to not litter; you could use a tree in your yard and later tie the ribbon off) to send a message of hope and healing! 🕯️Visit a park, lake, or forest and pick up litter. This is a great way to honor the coming of spring, but if it is too cold, you can always wait until it gets warmer! 🕯️Say goodbye to winter and start to welcome spring! You can do this through prayers, spells, thoughts, or actions. Meditation is one great way that you can do this! Cleansing, new beginnings, thriving, purification, and gratitude spells are also great ideas. 🕯️Honor Brighid if you wish to! You can make Brighid crosses or dolls, set a special place for Her on your altar or in your home, give Her a prayer or offering, or something else that honors Her during this special day.
