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Thursday, May 16, 2019

Profoundly Sad

But unsurprising.  A woman who is pregnant and ready to deliver shows up at ER as man.  No one asks what sex she really is.  Complications kill the baby.  So the hospital and doctors are at fault for assuming someone who presents as a man is a man.

2 comments:

  1. OK, I'm reading this via A PJ Media article reporting on a paywalled Washington Post article reporting on a subscriber-only NEJM article, so perhaps details are lost in this game-of-telephone; but what I see reported at the WP is:

    • Patient alerted triage nurse right at the start of their transgender/biological-female status:
    "The 32-year-old patient told the nurse he was transgender when he arrived at the emergency room"

    • Patient had done a home-pregnancy test that was positive and informed nurse of this at the start:
    "A home pregnancy test was positive and he said he had “peed himself” — a possible sign of ruptured membranes and labor."

    • Nurse ordered a pregnancy test to be done:
    "A nurse ordered a pregnancy test but considered him stable and his problems non-urgent."

    The issue is that the case should have been treated with more urgency than it was, as the triage and treating nurses considered it lower priority than some others at that ER -- as the mother seemed stable.

    It may be that appearing as a male had something to do with that lack of urgency, and both the physician's article in NEJM and the reporter of the WP article suggest that this was the case, but if they muster any evidence to support this conclusion, I'm overlooking it in what I've read.

    Note that this AP-News "news" article in the Washington Post was part of a paid sponsorship deal funded by the science education department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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