I have been exposed to hospitals as a guy who worked on their software, as a friend to a doctor, and as the relative of a patient. What I have seen is that hospital staff are generally well intentioned but extremely overworked, to the point that they can overlook obvious signs of a life-threatening illness. You can’t just assume that if you’re in a hospital then you’ll be taken care of. The doctor can be too busy to pay attention to you or too tired to think clearly about your condition. The doctor might even just forget that you’re there. You have to make sure that you’re getting a doctor’s attention, even if that means acting in a way that makes you feel like an entitled jerk.
My grandmother went to the hospital a couple of years ago because every few hours her heart would stop for several seconds. After she was in the emergency room for a day without receiving any treatment, some hospital employee came and wanted to discharge her. She and I refused so she ended up in a hospital bed for a couple of days, still with no treatment. Finally my sister came from another state, and my sister is less shy than I am. She actually found the cardiologist and made sure he looked at my grandmother’s condition. Once he did, he immediately sent her to surgery. She had a pacemaker put in and recovered.
(In case anyone is curious, my grandma says that when her heart stopped for long enough that she lost consciousness, she felt a wave of heat go through her body, her vision faded to black, and then she passed out. It didn’t hurt. In her case, her heart started again on its own but I suppose that for someone less fortunate, that would have been what it felt like to die.)
I’ve gone through some fun heart stuff, mostly my electrical system is just funky, wore a heart monitor, the whole thing - but yeah when finally talking to a cardiologist they were like “it’s nothing” and I asked “okay, so how do I know when it’s not nothing”. “If you lose consciousness, that’s when it’s not nothing”. Glad she persisted and pushed for it.
Psylocybin
I was a altar boy in my teens. One time in winter we had to attend a funeral. First we were in church, so I put on the white rope stuff during the mass. But then we had to go out to the graveyard for like half an hour more and stand there in the cold.
I told the priest that I would just quickly put on the jacket underneath because it was freezing outside. But he forbid in and said I should have thought of it before the mass and had it on under the ropes in church all the time because now there is no time for that. He forced us out without jackets into the freezing cold.
Right there I started thinking what kind of a priest do we have who cares more about dead people and make it convenient for them instead of the living. And if the priest represents god here in our community because he talks to him and can forgive our sins in his name and so on, then this is also gods will. So what king of a God am I worshiping here?
Anyway, I think that was the start of me stopping believing in God. I stopped being an altar boy, later stopped going to church and started actively researching those deeper questions around organized religion and god. Over time it led me to became an atheist who hasn’t seen any evidence for existence of any god.
I was a altar boy in my teens.
i was expecting this to turn a different direction.
Once I volunteered for a nonprofit fundraiser type thing. It was early spring and cold as hell. My friends got taken to the hay rides and the fire pit and they stuck me at the highway, pointing people towards the highly visible parking area. I marched in circles and designed ten thousand signs that could do the job that I was doing. I vowed then and there to never, ever be a cog in some Boomers vanity charity event ever again.
Service clubs tend to treat volunteers like slaves and then lament that no one wants to volunteer to be their slaves.
I was a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against a huge company. It was so rigged. The judge had overseen the class action lawsuit that we opted out of and acted like we were ungrateful little shits. But never in front of the jury; in front of the jury, he was all perfect law and order. But when they weren’t there, he was so obviously biased. I lost basically all faith in our justice system (USA). And I only had money on the line; for someone in a criminal case, it would be sooo much worse.
Yeah. Found myself in the system due to a misunderstanding. I was helpful and cooperative, they gave me the maximum sentence.
Working in food service, or being a manager. Both gave me very strong perspective for people in those situations and it would be impossible for me to go back to who I was before I understood these circumstances.
