ibs-qveen
60 posts
Latest Posts by ibs-qveen
It’s IBS Awareness Month, and honestly, I want to talk about the most annoying and frustrating part of IBS. I lose about an hour each day to it. That’s right. An hour. Half an hour in the morning, and half an hour in the evening. Yep, I start and end my day on the toilet, and while I’m nervous sharing this, I want people to think about that. Imagine being sick for an hour each day, every day, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you lose that time. You have to wake up earlier than average people to get ready for the day, you can’t start your day until you’ve been sick for half an hour, and you can’t end your day until you’ve been sick for half an hour.
I have other symptoms as well, and I know everyone's IBS is a bit different, but wow, it is such a time waster for me.
*banging metal objects together*
if your patients don't understand what you tell them, you are not an adequate or effective healthcare provider !!!
Thyroid Awareness Month! Waking up and feeling like a normal human being is always a gift that is never taken for granted.
Chronic pain things😎
join a community for all the girlies with gi issues.
warning: please be patient as i continue to work on it.
I'm so extremely serious when I say doctors should be put through an extremely extensive reliscensing process every 10 years. Doctors should have their knowledge scrutinized against current medical research and be de-barred at even the tiniest discrepancy. Too many old doctors absolutely refuse to stay up to date on research and dismiss patients because of their personal experiences. Too many people die every year because doctors don't take us seriously and refuse to listen to people who KNOW something is wrong. Too many people are told their problems are nothing and come back in a year or more with serious illnesses and doctors are just like "lol everyone makes mistakes" but doctors mistakes routinely cost people their lives! I'm tired of medical malpractice being swept away under the guise of "mistakes were made."
PSA as we go into spooky season and people start using activated charcoal to make foods look spooky.
Before you pay that not-covered hospital bill:
I want to take a min to spread awareness for the No Surprises Act after noticing a reddit post earlier.
This protection for patients just popped up in the past couple years, and the one major downside is that it's up to the patients to speak up to make use of it, but not everyone knows what it is.
"If you have private health insurance, these new protections ban the most common types of surprise bills. If you’re uninsured or you decide not to use your health insurance for a service, under these protections, you can often get a good faith estimate of the cost of your care up front, before your visit."
Consumer fact sheet
Typically, health insurance companies will help pay for bills from "in-network" providers, AKA their VIP inner circle gang turf. They won't help pay if you get medical care from another gang's henchmen (out of network).
This means that sometimes, a person would go to the hospital, which they knew had been covered by their insurance before, so they expect it's going to be relatively affordable. But they didn't know that multiple medical "gangs" were working in the same hospital. Their anesthesiologist, for example, was from a different gang. That specialist was out of network even though the surgeon and nurses were all in network.
Boom. Big bill for thousands of dollars and their insurance refuses to help pay it.
But now we have this law! The No Surprises Act means that insurance companies need to cover "surprise" expenses (under certain conditions).
If you don't have health insurance, hospitals and clinics need to give you an accurate quote before you get services, then foot the bill if they were too far off the mark.
The Fact Sheet section of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services have some wonderful user-friendly resources for you about health insurance and how this act works.
Keep in mind that Medicare and government-run programs always have weird rules for everything, so you might have different (yet similar) protections through those programs.
If you have a medical bill that wasn't covered by insurance and you think it might count as a surprise bill, please check out your rights and consider fighting it instead of letting it become a stressful expense or debt you can't repay.
Go here to start figuring things out for your situation:
Health insurance companies have way, waaaaay too much power over our lives. We need every drop of protection we can get - but it only counts as much as we can understand and use those protections!
How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke
It’s a fucking travesty that the leading cause of bankruptcy in these United States is medical bills. Not credit card bills nor risky investments. Not even student loans, but hospital bills. Invoices racked up through freak accidents and diseases the patient certainly didn’t ask for and would probably prefer to live without.
To our readers in other, more civilized countries, you’re dismissed. This week we’re going to be dissecting a uniquely American problem: exorbitant medical bills and how to pay them.
The CEO of GoFundMe, an online crowd-funding platform, never dreamed that his company would become synonymous with “I’m broke and need $300,000 to pay for my child’s cancer treatment.” What he envisioned as a way for entrepreneurs and artists to raise money for their passion projects has become the last desperate hope of sick and injured Americans on the verge of total financial ruin.
It blows, dear readers. It fucking blows.
Keep reading.
If you liked this article, join our Patreon!
anyway here's to disabled people who are not healing. disabled people who are not recovering, ever. people with disabilities that only get worse and worse over time. people who cannot access treatment for their disabilities or whose disabilities simply aren't treatable. people who know they'll only get more and more disabled as time goes on. people who know their disability will kill them sooner or later. you are seen, you are important, you are not dead weight, and you deserve support.
My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.
I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”
what are your thoughts on ibs diagnosis
78% of people reporting to ERs due to IBS have chronic gastritis.
population studies on microscopic colitis are rare, but have found that rates are much much higher on a population level than previously assumed
the symptoms labeled as ibs (diarrhea and constipation with no obvious flags for inflammatory bowel disease) are often treated as an issue of simple dietary intolerances, or as a psychosomatic condition, and people with ibs are told to follow various diets, or to "reduce stress."
these diets tend to be high fiber, which could literally kill someone whose actual issue is gastroparesis, or could severely aggravate microscopic colitis. i know that when i was trying to eat high fiber, my symptoms were completely unmanageable, and switching to a low fiber diet is the only thing that's helped at all. the food intolerance stuff can be really helpful for people who do have rare food intolerances, but for people who actually/also have autoimmune gastritis, it wastes time that could be spent monitoring for gastric atrophy, metaplasias, and precancerous lesions.
the worst part of this is that things like microscopic colitis and h-pylori related chronic gastritis are treatable, either with steroid medication or antibiotics to kill the h-pylori. but if you're dismissed with "dietary changes" or "reduce stress," then you're not getting treated for conditions that can cause really serious tissue damage and increase your cancer risk.
basically ibs is a "fuck you get out of my office" diagnosis
it shouldn't be a controversial take but:
disabled people are allowed to hate being disabled
friendly reminder you dont need a diagnosis to be in disability spaces, as an example im in constant pain and fatigue, have migraines every week and my joints hurts to a point I can't write, but since familiar gaslighting/medical trauma and the fact that im an indigenous, brown skin fat man a diagnosis is fucking hard (but im in my way! :)) , but i still deserve a safe space to talk about my experiences and to feel valuable and supported.
never feel like youre interrupting someone's space or that you shouldn't be here cause you dont have a diagnosis, disabilities existed before diagnosis
doctors offices are always like BE ON TIME IF YOU'RE MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES LATE WE'LL EXILE YOU TO MARS meanwhile you get there on time and wait a minimum of 20 minutes
Some people don’t want to hear this but sometimes accessibility is not sustainable or eco-friendly. Disabled people sometimes need straws, or pre-made meals in plastic containers, or single-use items. Just because you can work with your foods in their least processed and packaged form doesn’t mean everyone else can.
Alexithymia sucks. This chart helps!
How are you feeling? You don’t know? Me neither! So I look at this chart several times a day (got reminders set on my phone) to check in on how I’m feeling throughout the day. I’ve been doing it for a few months, and it’s actually getting a lot easier to identify how I’m feeling.
Pro tip: some people have to rely more on how their body feels to tell them what they’re feeling emotionally. Work on trying to identify how certain emotions feel in your body. Work in broad strokes at first, before working on identifying more specific emotions. For example, try to notice how sad, happy, angry, and afraid feel. Where in your body do you feel them? What physical sensations go along with the emotions? It’s different for everyone!
The more often you practice, the better you’ll get at it. This is all straight from my therapist and it’s how I’m finally feeling my feelings after years of dissociation.
There was a TikTok of an (American) woman who was documenting her husband’s ICU room and expressing displeasure with the state it was in, it was generally unclean with broken equipment, rust stains, clipped flooring, things that can make a medical environment unsafe. I opened the comments expecting people to be like “Wow, that’s scary. And a huge infection risk. ICU stays often cost patients upwards of $100k and not enough of that money is going to maintenance and cleaning.” But instead it was nurses being utterly vile to this woman. Not saying “You’re right, it’s terrible that we’re forced to do our jobs in unsafe, unclean and outdated environments.” they were telling her she was a prime example of why patients’ families were the worst part of their job.
The hospital that charged my insurance $87k for a single endoscopy & colonoscopy performed on me was recently fined for having dirty equipment. If not on sanitation, if not on giving nurses and providers better wages, if not on updating the facility, where the hell did that money go? If nurses could band together to attack and criticize hospital administration and the American medical system in the way they band together to attack and criticize patients and advocates online, all of our lives could improve.
But of course it is easier to raise the sword against the vulnerable person dependent on your care, on the people often experiencing the worst day of their life when they are too frightened and in pain to treat you with courtesy. It’s easier to lash out at the patient inquiring about their medication after waiting two hours than to lash out at the people responsible for making you responsible for 30 patients at once.
I don’t think anyone blames nurses for hospital rooms being nasty. It’s not their job. It’s the job of custodial staff and maintenance. It’s the job of administration to fund those departments. It’s a problem at the top. If we could all look upwards instead of down when it comes to who we criticize and blame, we could make progress.