On March 3rd Claudio’s life changed forever. As he sat waiting in his car for his wife and 4 year old son to run some errands he began convulsing. Claudio is a type 2 diabetic, he had recently been put on new medication and was suffering a possible side effect.
A store employee saw what was happening and called an ambulance. The employee then saw Claudio vomiting on himself and called for an ambulance again. Still no ambulance came. The employee called an ambulance 3 times and 30 minutes later still no ambulance, however a police officer did show up.Instead of receiving medical care Claudio was arrested and eventually transferred to ICE for deportation. Since Claudio and his family entered on a visa waiver they have no rights to an immigration judge or hearing. Claudio is being told ‘the next plane for Argentina leaves Tuesday!’
Why did a simple call to an ambulance lead to deportation? We need to keep this family together.
TAKE ACTION:2. Make a Phone Call: Call ICE – John Morton (202.732.3000)
Sample Script: ”I am calling to ask that ICE stop the deportation of Claudio Molina (A# 095-472-313). Claudio is type 2 diabetic, and began suffering from convulsions. Someone called an ambulance and instead police showed up and arrested Claudio. Claudio’s only crime is calling an ambulance for help! Stop his deportation.”
Uh IDK my thoughts on HAES and stuff
Like I think HAES does important shit because so much of fat discrimination is based in the idea that fat = unhealthy and it’s definitely really important to break down that myth. But at the same time I wish there was an equally powerful fat-posi force that focused on how health doesn’t define worth, how unhealthy people aren’t bad people and how no one owes their health to any-fucking-body. I just think both of these things are equally important and focusing so so so much on how fat people can be healthy too (which like I said is awesome and important) is basically playing into the ableism that’s the basis for much of the discrimination of fat folks in the first place.
YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?
My fat liberation is reclaiming fat stereotypes and exaggerating my unhealthy habits for the joy of pissing off concern trolls. My health is as private as I choose to make it.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!
Co-signing. I think the fat positivity movement and HAES both need to address a lot of the ableism and health shaming that are part of how they’re operating. Because yes, some fat people are not in perfect health, and whether or not their weight has anything to do with that, their imperfect health doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make them less or mean that somehow they deserve shaming.
(Source: vikkiisagenderneutralname)
A mysterious epidemic is sweeping Central America – it’s the second biggest cause of death among men in El Salvador, and in Nicaragua it’s a bigger killer of men than HIV and diabetes combined. It’s unexplained but the latest theory is that the victims are literally working themselves to death.—
Kidney Disease Epidemic | PRI’s The World
From the article (which is well worth the read and includes video):
All of them [the men who died] worked in the sugarcane fields.
“It is important that the chronic kidney disease (CKD) afflicting thousands of rural workers in Central America be recognized as what it is – a major epidemic with a tremendous population impact,” says Victor Penchaszadeh, a clinical epidemiologist at Columbia University in the US. He is also a consultant to the Pan-American Health Organization on chronic diseases in Latin America.
(via redlightpolitics)
it makes me angry that people are surprised at this information.
(via theoceanandthesky)
(via theoceanandthesky)
In the advent of World Meltdown Day, there is something I’d like to clarify. You know that crappy thing called BMI that the UN propagates under “goal of ideal health people should achieve towards being”? Besides being absolutely rubbish at promoting anything resembling ‘healthy’, BMI also…
(via oncejadedtwicesnarked-deactivat)
A couple may have their obese children removed after social services ruled they had not lost enough weight.
But although they were placed under constant supervision and social workers observed them during meal times, no dietary rules were imposed and there was no significant improvement in the children’s weight. The family spent two years living in a special council-funded house in which they were placed under a curfew and only three of the children were permitted to live with their parents at any one time.
Critics said the case, which is without precedent in Britain, was a serious breach of the family’s human rights and exposed the worrying extent to which the State can interfere in family life.
The mother, aged 42, told the Mail on Sunday: “They picked on us because of our size to start with and they just haven’t let go, despite the fact we’ve done everything to lose weight and meet their demands.”
The father, aged 56, added: “The pressure of living in the family unit would have broken anyone. We were being treated like children and cut off from the outside world. To have a social worker stand and watch you eat is intolerable.”
Also reported in the Mirror, The Metro, The Daily Mail and The Sun
How is this okay? How is this acceptable in any way?
I just CANNOT EVEN ANYMORE. I just can. not. fucking. even. I have no commentary except my rage and my hope that this family is able to heal after this and that somebody fires the great living HELL out of the social workers and other folks in the bureaucracy who perpetrated this fuckery.
(via droppingthefbomb-deactivated201)
Fat is not an evil substance that will cause every medical problem known to the world, it just isn’t
“…fat people (especially fat women) die every year because they walk into doctors’ offices with complaints that are ignored by doctors who can’t see past fat. Shortness of breath? Lose weight. Whoops, that was a pulmonary embolism. Pain in your leg? Lose weight. Whoops, that was bone cancer. The first doctor I saw when I had a herniated disk in my back many years ago told me it was back pain from fat. Lose weight. I damn well knew it wasn’t muscle pain, and I knew damn well it was something related to a known cyst on my spine, but I walked and walked and walked because, well, maybe if I lost weight I would feel better. That’s what all my doctors told me. I went on a 20-mile hike through the Scottish Highlands, and went into shock at the end of it, because my disk had herniated so severely. By the time I went to the emergency room at Northwestern in Chicago after I got home, I couldn’t even walk and had permanent nerve damage to my left foot.” - by Melissa McEwan in “Imagine That” http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2011/08/imagine-that.html
Emphasis of the first line mine. I HAVE KNOWN PEOPLE THIS HAS HAPPENED TO. None who are no longer with us, thankfully, but I’m reminded most specifically of one girl who went in for what she later learned was kidney problems that could be fatal and have nothing to do with one’s weight but was turned away several times because, well, she was fat.
We really really really need to unlearn our bigotries about fat.
Yup. I had a class with a girl whose doctors saw “fat, Black woman” and nearly missed her pancreatic cancer. She told the entire class about it one day, how she had to fight to get her symptoms taken seriously. This shit is life and death.
THIS. Especially at intersections where the medical system really lets people down (class, gender, race, AND size), we need to re-evaluate not only what we’re thinking about fat, but about the idea of healthy and what it means and why we need to totally dismantle a system that prizes perfect health as a sign that a patient has complied with the near-infalliability of doctors (which is a BIG FAT LIE) and been a good person.
Because it’s bullshit. Because doctors are just people. People who screw up, get tired, get lazy, get mistaken, have prejudices and isms, and may frankly be only mediocre at what they do on the best of days. Investing them with the kind of authority to declare that they are right and the patient is obviously wrong even when it comes to what the patient is LIVING AND EXPERIENCING is part of where this shit starts.
I won’t get into the fact that one of the basic problems with the health care system (esp. in the U.S.) is the idea that doctors are authorities and that patients must be “compliant”. That we think of “doctor’s orders”. Doctors, at best, should be thought of as health consultants. They give advice, they recommend things, they lend expertise, but the ultimate expert and authority ought to be the patient. Because when it swings the other way, people think that bad health is a failing that must be laid at a patient’s door rather than the sign of an issue that is not a moral failing but simply a biological issue.
What really hurts patients in relation to obesity is not the weight, its the stigma and the attitudes of the doctors who give them substandard care.