To understand this unfortunate phenomenon that spreads across hospitals both nationally and internationally, I will be focusing on the terrifying ordeal that a black woman who remains unidentified described in a TIME magazine interview entitled “I was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses saw was an Incompetent Black Woman.”

The woman’s ordeal began when she was four months pregnant and sometime after experiencing persistent feelings of discomfort she began to bleed while at work. From the jump the women understood that the odds would be stacked against her in the workplace and realized that she could not make a scene. If she would’ve “overplayed” her pain and suffering, she could be subject to criticisms from her white peers of laziness and seen as being dramatic. As a result, the woman made sure to complete the work assigned to her before she called her husband to pick her up from work.

Once the woman arrived, she found herself having to wait in the waiting room for at least 30 minutes despite calling ahead to make an appointment and describe her symptoms. The bleeding got so severe that she bled through the waiting room chair. It wasn’t until then that the nurses expressed any ounce of concern and finally took her to see the doctor. However, the Doctor’s explanation was dense. He gave her a diagnosis of being “fat “and tried to assure her that the spotting was “normal.” And just like that, she was sent home. Later that night, the woman began experiencing severe butt pain and when she eventually called the nurse, she dismissed it as constipation and suggested that she try to use the bathroom. The pain lasted about three days with the woman unable to sleep more than fifteen minutes over that time span.

After returning to the hospital, the nurses were now implying that the woman had eaten something bad which is why she was in so much pain but “begrudgingly” agreed to finally do an ultrasound and the results were stunning. What appeared in the women’s ultrasound were “three babies” but the problem was the woman was only pregnant with one. It was quickly determined that the other two ‘babies’ were actually large tumors. With that information the doctor dismissed the woman with a lack of concern stating, “If you make it through the night without going into preterm labor, I’d be surprised.” The woman was then moved into the maternity ward where she was reprimanded by nurse saying that she had actually been in labor for three days and should’ve said something.

Following these intense days of pain that would not end, the woman was finally wheeled into the operating room to deliver her baby. After arriving into the operating room, the pain was so severe that she began falling in and out of consciousness. For one moment that she woke up, the woman began screaming profanities in response to the pain as many pregnant women in labor do but to no surprise, she found herself being reprimanded again. The woman began begging for an epidural in which the anesthesiologist took forever to arrive to her side and when he did, threatened the woman that if she didn’t quiet down she would not receive the epidural.

After passing out once the woman received her epidural, it was time for her deliver her baby, a girl, who died after her first breath. As if the ordeal hadn’t been heartbreaking enough, the nurse left the woman the most chilling words aster it was “over.” The nurse said, “Just so you know, there was nothing we could have done, because you did not tell us you were in labor.”

https://time.com/5494404/tressie-mcmillan-cottom-thick-pregnancy-competent/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/how-training-doctors-implicit-bias-could-save-lives-black-mothers-n873036

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/02/20/why-are-black-women-at-such-high-risk-of-dying-from-pregnancy-complications

You see the way my life is setup right now, really, this past year and some change, it has been a sinking ship that I’ve been trying to patch up with tape. And I’m not talking about that Flex Tape they be trying to sell us on those infomercials, if you know what I’m talking about. That actually would have probably worked.

I suck at getting help. Getting help is hard. The thought of how much better I could feel and how much more successful I could be while getting the help that I need, torments the force that is stopping me from getting help in the first place. My head is so jumbled that even sitting here trying to write about this is a struggle. My thoughts are usually all over the place and in no place at the same time. It feels like there’s this mental block stopping me from getting through the simplest shit like putting my classes in my google calendar. I easily get overwhelmed with things like making doctor appointments even though I can feel parts of my body needing to be assessed.

Everything really started with the pandemic. Spring 2020 I remember sitting in Erickson Hall in the common room of my suite with my roommates getting the news. The news about covid-19 reaching the U.S. and how after Spring break we would be staying home. What I felt in that moment was one of my worst fears coming a reality. I guess it would be okay though since this all was going to blow over after a couple of weeks, but as you all know, our stay home was much longer than expected and covid-19 was much more of threat than we initially thought.

Since then, things have been going downhill. I was living in fear and having chronic anxiety. Nowhere was safe, even in my dreams. The people close to me know my fears, one of them being my mom who frequently enough brought up my fear because it was something she believed in. Even when my thoughts (rarely) would slightly calm down, boom! I was triggered and It felt like I couldn’t escape it. This would intensify my fear and anxiety to the point where I didn’t want to be here anymore. On top of all this, online school was horrible for me. I was constantly interrupted by my thoughts, stopped participating, had lost motivation in going to class, in doing schoolwork, and overall lost a lot of functioning as a college student. I had changed. Before all of this I had been really improving my GPA after my fuck ups from Freshman year, but that took a quick turn. Fall 2020 I took a W on my transcript, got my first D, and started fucking up with my job. Spring 2021 I took another W, got my first F, and continued to fuck up with my job. This summer I got kicked out of my scholars’ program and lost a big scholarship because I didn’t take enough credits over the past two semesters (those W’s got me). After not having to take out loans for being an RA last year, now I have to again even though I’m still an RA. This semester I am already struggling. It has been an endless cycle of wanting to do better, needing help, not getting help, and doing worse. I am so much more than this.

Throughout this whole time, I have been self-aware enough to know that I need help, a lot of it. Truth be told, my problems even go way beyond school. I know that I need help, but many of the things I need help with are the same things that are making it really hard for me to get help. When I try to explain this to my friends, professors, and to all the people I have disappointed, it is easy for them to see excuse after excuse. This is my experience. It is hard to understand and feel what I feel coming from a different point of view. To be honest, some of it is laziness, but a lot of it is also a reality of being stuck and silently yearning out for help. Flex tape would have been a better alternative.

My partner has been sick for the last few days. Yesterday, he went to pick up a covid test from CVS. They told him that without insurance, the test would cost $200.

Luckily, it wasn’t the end of the world: he was able to use a spare test that his friend happened to have, and based on his symptoms, it was pretty unlikely that he’d had covid in the first place. But what if he’d been coughing? Or had a fever? Or experienced shortness of breath? A covid test is only the first of a series of concerns, not least of which is the extreme price of hospital stays, especially if you don’t have insurance. This unaffordability of basic resources like covid tests came as a shock to me, as it differs drastically from Biden’s rhetoric about working-class people and covid — that being: “We need to make them care about this! We need to teach them how to be responsible and healthy!” The ignorant focus on promoting personal responsibility, instead of alleviating structural concerns like unaffordability, is disturbing but not surprising. And the covid test is only a very, very small part of the difficulties working-class people face in accessing affordable body knowledge.

My body has always been unruly.  As a child, I was so skinny kids would call me Olive Oyl. Now some of you may be wondering, who the hell is “Olive Oyl.” Well, she is the wife of Popeye. Not the chicken place. The sailor man. He lives in a garbage can. He likes to go swimming with bowlegged women. Nevermind.

I have a love-hate relationship with food. But not for the reasons most would think. You see, everything I put in my mouth is a Math equation. I hate Math—especially when 2+2 should equal four, and it doesn’t. Math isn’t so simple when you are an insulin-dependent diabetic. So when my young ass, endocrinologist, asks, “are you Bolusing for the correct amounts?” and I just give them my resting bitch face and respond. “I’ve been doing this math shit since I was 10 years old.” Dont ask me that stupid question because you dont have an answer to my question. I’m obligated to come to this office twice a year for insurance. Just fill my scripts and i will see you in 6 more months. I didn’t say that BUT I’m sure my side eye did because I’m wearing a mask and can’t give my normal RBF. Signed. Filled. See you in 6 months. Guaranteed it will be someone else and my frustration will start all over again.

I have been a diabetic for 45 years. That’s a long-ass time to be thinking about food every day.

Every meal 

Every snack.

 It is what some of us do. If you want to avoid complications. But that’s another story.

It gets very frustrating.

 When I was diagnosed, It was called Juvenile diabetes. Now it’s called Type 1. 

This ain’t your Grandma’s diabetes.

 It didn’t come from eating too much sugar.

 No, I wasn’t a fat kid.

 And Yes, I can eat that.

 But to eat it first, I have to do the math.  Then once you know the math, it’s easy to dose the correct amount of insulin for each carb you eat. Each and every one. Yep, that’s what I said.

Each

One 

That is… easy if… you are not sick, there are no hidden carbs, you are not stressed, not a hormonal teen, hormonal adult, or take meds that have hidden sugars, and all is right in your world.

When I was a kid, I would hide it as much as possible—sneaking off to the nurse’s office in school to take insulin before lunch—hating it. Thinking the other kids would find out. . Your acceptable foods list, you knew the carbs if it was listed on the package, great. Easy math. But if you didn’t know how many carbs, it was a guessing game, and the math was not easy.

 Nope not in front of people

 If I couldn’t be discreet, I would eat without insulin, and my blood sugars would be sky high when I got home, and my mother would be pissed. The worse part,  passing up on something I wanted because I didn’t want anyone to see that weird kid …yeah her. She sticks needles in her stomach because her mom gave her too much sugar. When you are a kid, nobody wants to stand out. You just want to fit in and be…like everybody else. My unruly body made sure I didn’t fit in. That is until I went to summer camp.

Diabetic kids camp.

 I laugh out loud now. That’s is sooooo f**ked up to call it. But that’s what it was. 

 At camp, I was just like everyone else. We were all poking our fingers and sticking needles in our stomachs. We were all doing the math, hopefully not of the top of our heads. Thank god for the invention of insulin pumps. But that’s another story.

At camp, I found my community. We would spend our days hiding from the nurses, sneaking off into the woods not to meet with a crush but to have carbs outs. A carb out… eating contraband the candy the counselors didn’t find when they searched our luggage.

How the hell is a pack of Now and Later’s contraband. As good as that shit it.

Anyway

We would have a competition as to who could eat the most carbs without injecting insulin or letting their blood sugars drop the lowest without passing out. 

Fun times. 

The adult in me says. That was so stupid. That was our way of rebelling. 

It took a lot of growing. Now I am unashamed about my unruly diabetes. I no longer hide checking my unruly blood sugars or dosing insulin. I don’t care if my pump alarm is loud enough for other people to hear.  Nothing is as exciting as seeing someone with a CGM on their arm and the fist bumps we give one another. Or how quickly we lift the sleeve of a shirt to show off the CGM. Especially the “sugarbabies” who decorate their devices with colorful stickers and bling. It’s more… normal. They don’t have to hide.

I think I speak for everyone when I say that College should be free or at least a much cheaper price than what colleges offer. We as college students wake up early, come to class, do assignments, and then go back to work just to pay for college and try to support our lives while also trying to reach our dreams. Once we finish college, its like…well what now?? The life after college is a huge mystery because you could start working your dream job right after college or work a regular 9-5 and be miserable. Its really rare to get THAT DREAM job smack out of college. The amount of money that college students spend just to try to get that job is crazy and its never enough which puts our mental states in bad spot sometimes. The lack of sleep, eating, stress that we get from cramming exams, trying to pitch resumes, finishing assignments, and projects just isn’t worth all that money.

Who was the person who made the call to have people pay for college?? We would like to know man cause college should be free or at least a reasonable price and I’m not just talking about community college. College in general. We shouldn’t be in debt years down the line and feeling bad or regretting college because the amount of money that we owe after graduation. Gradation should be the happiest part of finishing but sometimes its not because students realize the amount of many that they owe once they’re done if they’re not on scholarships or have a real good job to pay it off in a couple of years. Moral of this story is……Stop making College stressful and overpriced! Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Do I actually want children or do I only want children because society, culture, and family has enforced the idea I do? When I was younger this was an easy question to answer. I would have said something along the lines of: “Of course I want children. Who wouldn’t? I want 4 kids!” I thought that was what you were supposed to do when you “grow up.” You get married and then have children… easy. As I got older I realized very quickly that it was not that simple. 

First off, pregnancy and giving birth affects your body in so many ways. Pregnancies are not as simple as cravings and a round tummy. Your body has to completely transform and adjust for the baby growing in your stomach. Some of these changes are permanent. And then there are so many stigmas around women having sagging breasts, stretch marks, and their vagina stretching. As if any of that even matters. I don’t know if I am ready for my body to completely change. Also, the thought of my vagina ripping gives me chills. I will never be mentally prepared for that.  

Another aspect of having children that scares the shit out of me is somehow fucking them up. That might be a harsh way to put it, but that’s exactly how I feel. What if I don’t give it enough love and attention… or I give it too much? What if I’m too strict or I’m too lenient? How do you even raise kids? I know my parents did the best they could to raise me but I really wish they could have done a lot of things differently. I wish they could have waited to have me and my brother when they were more financially stable and their marriage wasn’t on the verge of falling apart. 

Once you have children you suddenly have to live your life for someone else. Your decisions in life now directly affect another human being. I can’t choose to suddenly move to a different country and live out a dream there because I have to consider my child that relies on me. I am so scared I am going to lose my identity. I always think about how much happier my mother would be if she didn’t spend the majority of her life raising us. She could have done so many more things. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt like she needed to be stuck in a bad marriage, and she could remarry and find actual love. 

But at the same time, I love kids. Any time I see my younger cousins I love playing with them. I love holding and cuddling babies. It’s exciting to think about taking care of a baby and having a family with the person I love. Whenever anyone asks if I want kids my answer is usually yes, but I always explain my hesitations. I know that if I ever do decide to have my own children I have to be 100% okay with everything that could possibly go wrong. 

At times my body doesn’t feel real. Could it be my routine? Or the fact that when I go about my own day, I’m forced to mask myself when I’m inside my parent’s house. Now me lacking the sense of my own body isn’t something I have considered to always be negative. Sometimes I just need the escape from everyday routine and interactions with my family at home is especially tiring. Preparing in the morning on some days, I stare a little too long at the full-length mirror by our bathroom and think to myself, “is this really me?”. I’m generally introverted, but I do like having social interaction depending on who it’s with, usually close friends.

Though the pandemic came almost two years ago, we are not yet over the lasting effects of the COVID-19 virus, so why are we as a society moving forward as if we have beaten it?

I moved into my apartment here in Baltimore a couple of weeks before the semester started. In the hardly-two-months I’ve lived here, I’ve been preoccupied with school, finding work, finding affordable groceries, and going to the gym. It was a friend’s birthday this week though so her and I hit the town on Thursday. We pre-gamed in my living room and talked about how we’d never been out without male partners, or male friends and that tonight felt both liberating and unprotected. I’m not too far from Federal Hill so we walked along the bar strip, heading in and out of bars until we found one we liked. The Charles was hosting a four-year anniversary party (which seemed pre-mature and anticlimactic to us, but maybe four years is a long time to be established in Baltimore?) in which most people were dressed in suits and spring dresses, and others showed up in VOLO jerseys and shorts. Our outfits landed us somewhere in between, but the bar wasn’t playing Wonderwall or Santeria and that seemed good enough to us.