A Lesson

November 8th 2018 11:30am.

Today is November 8th 2018 and it has officially been an entire year since I lost my grandma. I have never experienced losing a relative this close to me in all of my adult life so when she passed away I was honestly very depressed and unsure of how I was going to manage life without her. I would constantly have dreams about her when she passed away and I still do if I am being honest. I know it has been a while, and this is going to be my last blog post but before I sign off for good I wanted to give people a few lessons so that what happened to my family does not happen to yours.

One of the mistkaes that my family made I feel like was completely putting our trust into the hands of a doctor who had absolutely no personal connection to our family. While doctors are not supposed to become personally involved in the lives of their patients, the disconnect that developed between our family and Dr. McGuire was very unsettling in hindsight. It should not be asking too much for a family to be able to trust wholeheartedly that the doctors who take care of our loved ones actually care and are not just in it for a paycheck. While this expectation is not absurd it is an expectation I will never have again, because all it did was leave our family hurt and disappointed. My lesson here is that for anyone, but especially black patients and the families of black patients, it is important that you feel comfortable and like you can trust the doctors you interact with. While white doctors have had a history of treating black patients poorly it would be wrong to say they all did this. There were signs such as negative attitudes, dishonest reporting, and weird test results that you should look out for, that should have alarmed us but we were too blind with our trust, thinking that he would never let something happen to my grandma that could have been preventable. Although, her death might not have been intentional we feel like if he had been a little more attentive the outcome might have been completely different.

After my grandma passed away the general practitioner that diagnosed her with the early stage kidney failure that Dr. McGuire never caught not only called us and spoke to us for 10 minutes to send her deepest sympathies, but also sent our family a card. Mind we have known this doctor for about 5 fewer years that we have know Dr. McGuire and he only spoke with us for about 45 seconds after her passing. While neither of them were in no way obligated to call or send us anything it was heartwarming to know that her general practioner Dr. Meyer cared enough to do so anyways. I think the lack of care on part of Dr. McGuire was very telling of his true feelings towards not only my grandma, but also our entire family. For me it confirmed earlier suspicions that I had regarding the way he was treating my grandma.

Our progress on our lawsuit is doing well because our lawyer does feel like there was wrongdoing on part of Dr. McGuire. He told us that there were quite a few steps that Dr. McGuire did not take that he could have which could have ultimately prevented her death. Without even having to mention it to him our lawyer Aaron Suggs actually told us that he feels like he could even make a case for racial bias towards my grandma, which was shocking to me because I thought it was my paranoia that was telling me this could have been a possibility. The fact that a seasoned lawyer also thinks this lets me know that there was a big issue in the case of my grandma.

Essentially, what I want you all to take away from this post is that there are deep rooted issues within the medical-industrial complex and black patients are usually the ones who endure the consequences. For too long black and brown bodies have been used, abused and manipulated by white doctors and I want everyone to know that this is not something that is only talked about in papers. It is real. It happened to my family and we would do anything to go back and make changes, but we cannot. All we can do is enlighten other people about what is going on and hope that other families do not have to feel the same pain that we deal with everyday. It is hard to not blame ourselves because sometimes we think if we had done something differently then she might not be here, but this is wrong. We did not do anything wrong by trusting Dr. McGuire, he was the one who messed up. I hope our story can teach those who read my blog about the injustices within the medical-industrial complex.