I remember reading about Mr. Johnson’s experience in the article below. This excerpt is why members of my family try our best never to go to the hospital alone. Without someone to advocate for you or support your wishes, the outcome could be tragic. The Hulk image is apt, because sometimes we have to channel our anger and worry when faced with people who are uncaring and dismissive. At the same time, going too far could turn into an encounter with law enforcement. I’d rather run the risk of being arrested than have to live with this kind of regret:
“I sit awake at nights thinking maybe I should have grabbed somebody by the collar, maybe I should’ve turned a table over, would that have made a difference? Even two years later, I still can’t make sense of it in my mind.”
Stories like this are another example why distrust of hospitals and healthcare facilities is common in the Black community:
Any pediatrician who cannot recognize a congenital dermal melanocytotic (Mongolian) spot needs to reconsider their professional education. These are very common in populations with more melanin, relatively rare in those lacking. They have historically been confused with bruising, but honestly, having seen lots of both, they do not look the same. Having said that, we always try to document these carefully to spare our patients this exact experience.
Our family is mixed race but it’s not obvious, so when one of my daughters was born with Mongolian spots, I made the pediatrician note every single one, especially the one at the base of the spine, in the medical records so that if I had to bring her to an ER they wouldn’t make exactly that assumption about us.
Hey, on the good news front, UVA is finally doing away with the “race-corrected eGFR” calculation for assessing kidney function. It’s a long overdue step, but it is finally being done. so, yay for small steps, I guess?
Infamous misogynoir slinger Kevin Samuels has passed.
FBook commentary i really appreciate from Professor Brittney Cooper:
I first learned who Kevin Samuels was in early 2021 when my MUA inboxed me to tell me that Kevin had used a clip of me talking about racism and fatphobia as an example of a “low value woman.” In other words, he considered me a “low value woman.” Some months later he recirculated that same clip via Instagram inviting more derision from his largely Black followership about my life, my body, and my romantic prospects. Suffice it to say, I didn’t respect anything that man said or did. In fact, I think he has had an outsized impact on poisoning the social discourse between Black men and Black women around matters of love, dating, and intimacy. He has made the stakes less clear even as people hungry to understand how hard it is to find love feel like he has made things more clear. He has not. I think he consistently confused the issues, making both Black women’s desire for love and audacity to have standards the problem. He also routinely shamed and made fun of working class Black men, while projecting his disdain for them on to Black women, as though we are the ones who hate Black men.
That said, to see someone at the top of his game, though I didn’t respect his game, so suddenly eclipsed away from here feels jarring. There has been a lot of collective loss these last 2 years. And even though I would have as soon cussed this man out as had a conversation, his death just doesn’t bring me any joy.
Perhaps it brings a perverse form of relief though. There is a small window of opportunity here to try to reset Black social discourse(s) around love and intimacy again. There is an opportunity here, in the silence left by Samuels’ absence to detox from the poison. There is an opportunity to not rush to fill the space with more noise and nonsense.
I know this probably won’t happen, but it could. I know that eager, thirsty influencers and relationship hacks are gonna rush to fill the vacuum he left. I expect lots of internecine crabs in a barrel BS and in-fighting as folks jockey for position.
But I hope in the chaos of that madness, that we stop being enamored of charismatic brothers in nice suits — false prophets — spewing poison. I hope that we see this dude for the broken, lonely, misguided man he was. I hope we learn, to keep it biblical, how to test the spirits.
I hope that Black men will find healthy outlets for their rage and stop piling that shit upon Black women’s backs. I hope that the Black women who liked Kevin’s work stop letting the latest brother with relationship advice exploit your pain. (Don’t let these preachers do it either.) I hope that what we get to some clarity about is the way that white supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy have absolutely nothing to offer Black folks who are honestly trying to see and show up for and love one another. Money won’t save us. Lives that fulfill white middle class fantasies won’t save us. Instituting patriarchal ideas of domination and submission won’t save us.
Black love is not a marketplace. We are not commodities. Our times spent together are not transactions. Black love is a gathering place. A precious place, however and whenever freely or fugitively constituted. We have collectively lost that sense of how precious it is. And yet somewhere in us, we know that none of this makes sense without love. That’s why we are clamoring so hard for something real, even as we keep missing it, because the image we have in our minds so often doesn’t match the way actual love shows up.
We have been traumatized by systems that sell us middle class heteronormative fantasies of what it should look like for us to be together. It is making so many of us miserable and lonely and therefore vulnerable to exploitation by bad actors and phony messengers promising us empty solutions.
I actually hope Kevin Samuels finds the peace he so clearly didn’t have in this life. (I don’t believe anyone else owes him such magnanimity but I am being myself.) I hope in this manner, because frankly my life has been filled in one form or another with toxic men, some gone too soon, whom I loved, whose demons took them out of here, and the empathy I feel for how systems break us and twist us into lesser versions of ourselves oddly enough attends to Kevin, too. And certainly my empathy is conveniently extended on the occasion of his death because I would never have been interested in extending him that empathy in life. I could not have emotionally afforded to do so, given his specific discursive assaults on me and his generalized ones to all Black women.
I don’t have a good ending place here. I just wanted to share my testimony. And perhaps express a little hope that we don’t miss this collective invitation to show up to and for each other differently. The times require it and indeed are begging us for it.
Here’s hoping Subaru dumps this dealership for harming their carefully crafted inclusive brand. It’s not like there’s a shortage of Subaru dealerships in the area.
The amended accusation (at the end of the pdf) goes into a bit more detail as to the timeline of events - does that help clarify things?
It seems to me to read as 17 minutes total surgery time with the surgeon handing over to non- surgical staff after 17 minutes. I don’t know what that would involve or if that’s within the bounds of reasonable practice.
But since the surgeon didn’t meaningfully contest the accusation, I’d assume it’s not good.
That’s bad. Surgeons can turn over closing skin to their assistant, but only after everything is done, all bleeding is controlled, and that’s all that is left. I have seen that in other surgeries, never in c-sections, honestly. But i think thisis a teaching hospital, there may have been a resident physician assisting. Not that that part matters. Whole story is unconscionable.
Well that was awful. I’m not a doctor, but Niam’s actions seem more than simply negligent and 4 years probation is not enough. At least he won’t be allowed ina supervisor role- maybe no one else has to die because of him.
The race of the patients isn’t mentioned (which makes sense when the board is trying to protect privacy) but I noticed one of the other victims of this doctors neglect has schizophrenia. So yeah. I suspect this guy has a seriously bad case of judging who isn’t worth his time. Which is bad bad bad for a doctor.
Fucking terrifying to think of being under the care of someone like that when I was preggo. I saw my doc or one of their partners at least every 4-6 hours while in hospital for 5 days.
Wow, that is one scary read. TBH, I’m less concerned about the 17 minutes (which is ridiculously fast) as I am appalled with the doc’s repeated problems recognizing problems of peripartum hemorrhage. The OBs I trained with are paranoid as all fuck, because bleeding can be sudden and deadly. To continue recommending an “expectant management plan” when presented with obvious signs of bleeding is unconscionable*. The negligent prenatal care recordkeeping for Patient 5, leading to an awful result, and the willful ignorance of prenatal history for Patient 6 both suggest he just quit giving a shit about things some years ago. God knows how many near misses there were outside the cases given in the board report.
Gross, gross negligence. I wonder where he’s practicing now, since a review of his record should put a big “DO NOT HIRE THIS UNCARING GOON” around his neck.
-– ETA: Found him. Looks like he’s in solo practice in LA. His website blurb about himself is laughable: “Dr . Arjang Naim is a compassionate, well-known OB-GYN”
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* Do you have any idea just how much guts it took for the house staff to document their disagreement with the attending doc (paragraph 20)? Disagreements happen all the time but infrequently documented, and consideration of going over an attending’s head is a BIG FUCKING DEAL. I know that if I had reached that point but didn’t follow through, a bad outcome would eat at me forever; I suspect it’s the same for those residents.
