We do what we must because we can
Jul. 6th, 2011 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupIn 2008, I had a combination wisdom tooth removal/jaw surgery to correct chronic pain in my jaw dating back to 2005. If you haven't had chronic pain, I'm not sure if I can convey how stupid it makes you. A mere six months after it started I told the dentist to go ahead and do the filling replacement under partial Novocaine, because the bitch didn't believe me when I told her I needed more and while she had injected a lot, wasn't doing so any faster than my body could clear it out, and I was desperate to get it treated. My dentist recommended the two surgeries after the second root canal failed to help, but it had to be scheduled out several months because I was terrified of general anesthetic* and insisted both be done at once, even though they required separate practitioners. I was contracting at the time and had made job-taking decisions based in part on scheduling around this surgery. Oh, and I had to get up very early in the morning for it, so I was sleepy.
So when the receptionist told me it was standard practice to remove biopsied tissue to check for cancer, I signed the form. According the legal chapter in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the doctors and/or lab can legally do whatever they want with that tissue. If I had spontaneously donated that, that wouldn't bother me. If I'd been informed ahead of time and had carefully considered it, it wouldn't bother me. But I was not in a position to do any of those. I would have cut my wrist and signed the form in blood if it would get me into surgery faster. And my chronic pain wasn't even that painful, as these things go.
I'm pretty convinced that what bothers people the most isn't that someone somewhere is making money off their tissues. It's that we're taking advice on things we don't understand from people who suspect don't like us very much, and while I'm sureno very few dentists have recommended surgery for the sole purpose of extracting tissue to sell for profit, the human brain forms associations. And if you have a more positive association with things that involve tissue removal you're going to, on the margin, recommend more tissue removal. And we're all so terrified of doing the wrong thing and so desperate to trust an authority figure that we seize on the one thing we can control.
And then there's the fact that they can keep things like the state-mandated blood draws for genetic testing. That's just bullshit.
That was really depressing, especially if you know that the surgery didn't help me either, and that it's impossible to know whether the initial trauma, the initial dentist fuck ups, the improperly anesthetized filling replacement, the root canals, or the surgery caused the lingering problem. So to end on a lighter note: oral surgery didn't actually leave any open wounds, except for where the wisdom teeth were and that's why I got dry socket, which to be fair made me forget about the low level chronic pain I was experiencing pretty quickly. Anyway, the surgery left no open wounds that needed band aids, but the IV for the anesthetic did. It was a My Little Pony bandaid, and I'm convinced it was classic MLP although given that I was still heavily sedated at the time, I'm not sure you should believe me. But I was clearly paying attention, because I asked the friend who was taking care of me why I had a My Little Pony bandaid no less than five times.
*Tangent: I'm pretty sure I'd be less afraid of general anesthetic if doctors would just admit that it's to prevent you from from forming memories of terrible pain, not from feeling terrible pain. The fact that they won't admit makes me wildly inflate the percentages of people who wake up in surgery screaming.
So when the receptionist told me it was standard practice to remove biopsied tissue to check for cancer, I signed the form. According the legal chapter in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the doctors and/or lab can legally do whatever they want with that tissue. If I had spontaneously donated that, that wouldn't bother me. If I'd been informed ahead of time and had carefully considered it, it wouldn't bother me. But I was not in a position to do any of those. I would have cut my wrist and signed the form in blood if it would get me into surgery faster. And my chronic pain wasn't even that painful, as these things go.
I'm pretty convinced that what bothers people the most isn't that someone somewhere is making money off their tissues. It's that we're taking advice on things we don't understand from people who suspect don't like us very much, and while I'm sure
And then there's the fact that they can keep things like the state-mandated blood draws for genetic testing. That's just bullshit.
That was really depressing, especially if you know that the surgery didn't help me either, and that it's impossible to know whether the initial trauma, the initial dentist fuck ups, the improperly anesthetized filling replacement, the root canals, or the surgery caused the lingering problem. So to end on a lighter note: oral surgery didn't actually leave any open wounds, except for where the wisdom teeth were and that's why I got dry socket, which to be fair made me forget about the low level chronic pain I was experiencing pretty quickly. Anyway, the surgery left no open wounds that needed band aids, but the IV for the anesthetic did. It was a My Little Pony bandaid, and I'm convinced it was classic MLP although given that I was still heavily sedated at the time, I'm not sure you should believe me. But I was clearly paying attention, because I asked the friend who was taking care of me why I had a My Little Pony bandaid no less than five times.
*Tangent: I'm pretty sure I'd be less afraid of general anesthetic if doctors would just admit that it's to prevent you from from forming memories of terrible pain, not from feeling terrible pain. The fact that they won't admit makes me wildly inflate the percentages of people who wake up in surgery screaming.
