You'll Feel Better After the Truck Hits You

looking out from the icu

I’ve spent more time in hospitals with sick family in the last six months than I spent in all the rest of my life put together, but I’m sure that’s just a weird coincidence. Get your boosters, and keep listening to the public health officials who are making everything better for us. Compliance will get us through this, obviously, and lots of hospitalization is clearly the path the good health.

The thing that fascinates me about the healthcare system is that it’s full of strong, capable, serious, caring people, while the outcomes that system delivers get worse and worse. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to spend time around extremely sick people, watching nurses deal with the horror of severely damaged human bodies is a remarkable experience. I’m sure there I’ll hear from people who’ve had different experiences, but I’ve never met a shitty nurse in a consequential moment, and I doubt anyone works harder or better in tougher circumstances than ICU nurses. I hate the circumstances of their work, but I love watching them: the task focus, the problem-solving skills, the teamwork, the diligence, the physical and mental endurance, the tough compassion.

So if you descend into a hospital, and I chose the word descend with great care, you’ll be surrounded by compassion and competence all day, every day. The nurses will be brilliant, and the physical therapists will be wonderful, and the respiratory therapists will be highly competent and alert, and you’ll constantly be impressed and relieved by how great everyone is. While our health declines, on average, and life expectancy recedes, and average quality of life deteriorates. It’s a wonderful thing that, on average and over time, doesn’t work.

I have a dozen theories about why that is, some angrier than others, but I’ll save them for later. For now, what I want to say is that successful surgery tends to be….interesting. An interesting term. Surgery is trauma, and profoundly so. Cutting things out of your body, even when it works really well, is brutal and a horror. I wonder how many surgeons see that, so send word if you’re actually a surgeon and know the answer. Ditto the sentence, “The chemotherapy was successful.”

Politeness makes you look away, but the briefest glimpses suffice: In hospitals, you watch bodies. And the things pain and trauma do to the body are horrible. Desperately sick people twist. Their bodies contort, shrink into themselves, try to escape themselves. Faces are ashen, contorted, and then blank. So. Good times.

In that moment, sitting in the SICU, hearing and seeing pain everywhere, I was directed to a conversation about the tens of thousands of people — many of them teenagers — who are using Go Fund Me to raise money for gender affirming surgery:

Scroll through Go Fund Me bottom surgery campaigns here, and top surgery campaigns here. A cabinet of horrors. Give me money so I can cut off my healthy body parts. It’s fun and affirming and warm, see?

“God keep us, keep us all.”

See also this investigative report from Reuters, late last year:

Overall, the analysis found that at least 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria from 2017 through 2021. Reuters found similar trends when it requested state-level data on diagnoses among children covered by Medicaid, the public insurance program for lower-income families….

These medical treatments don’t begin until the onset of puberty, typically around age 10 or 11….

The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021. Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket.

Surgery isn’t affirming. Surgery is an assault on your body, even when it’s necessary and effective. This ends in pain.