Misinformation PSA

andrearitsu:

daniellemertina: la-tenore-regina: heteroaesthetical: former-fatty: harostar: So I’ve seen a story circulating around social media, and I figured I would do a little debunking to prevent misinformation. In the story, a woman claiming to be a black Pediatric/Cardiac Nurse states that a racist couple prevented her from caring for their infant, resulting in the child’s death. As the daughter of a Critical Care Nurse (the highest certification level for a Nurse), and someone that works with Hospital Security and a police department that deals with the hospital on a daily basis…….nothing in her story makes sense. Claim: She was the only person that could perform the life-saving task. Fact: Nurses are primarily tasked with routine patient care and assisting doctors. Even CCRNs do not perform procedures themselves, and hospitals have a Code/Crash Team that responds to any critical situation. The doctors are the ones that actually perform complex or major tasks. Had she claimed to be the Specialist On Call, that would be more believable. But she stated she’s a nurse, and therefore would NOT have been the “only person capable of performing the task”.

Claim: The parents threatened and physically assaulted her, forcing her to leave the room. Fact: Any time patients’ family causes problems, Security is called to remove them from the immediate area. If they threaten or assault staff, Police are called. Family are not allowed to interfere with the ability of staff to provide medical care. A police report is always filed should someone assault hospital staff.

Claim: Hospital Staff were forced to stand by and watch the baby die due to the parents’ hostility.

Fact: Hospitals have a Social Worker and/or Patient Advocate present, who is there to take over as the Custodian and Guardian of patients. They represent the rights of the patient, should the parents/guardians be endangering the patient or otherwise be felt to be a danger to them.

So in conclusion, the story reads as completely false based on my personal knowledge and experience.

ETA: It seems that she removed the story from her Twitter account, further indicating that something was fishy.

@zorphs just FYI, the nurse story is a fake. @kdryvtsv you were right KABOOOOOM! Knew that shit was phony Folks make up ANYTHING for notes and likes cause their real lives are dull as FUCK What a disgusting little piece of crusty bread I don’t like when ppl lie about racism because then it harms Black ppl when we need to address actual racism. Considering that other nurses and health workers responded with saying this stuff isn’t uncommon and they’ve seen it too and that she removed the story because of massive harassment from coming out with it, I don’t think it’s fair to just go “yeah, it’s not true” like this.



^^^ Yeah.

First of all, the OP states right up front their knowledge is from being the daughter of a CCN and working with hospital security, so she’s using second-hand authority to make these accusations. Plus, we are taking at face value that OP’s second-hand authority is even true. She doesn’t state where her mother works, what hospitals she works with, or even what working with “hospital Security and a police department that deals with the hospital on a daily basis” entails. Is she a dispatcher? A rep for a supply company of some sort? A secretary? We don’t know, and we can’t really confirm her authority with any of this information, but we’re so quick to believe her when she refers to the person who made the tweets as “a woman claiming to be a black Pediatric/Cardiac Nurse” when she is in fact a woman also claiming to have knowledge that allows her to “debunk” this story.

Second, OP is assuming that all hospitals are equally staffed/equipped to make these “facts” necessarily true, but even if these are meant to be uniform policies, lack of resources could mean that effective security or patient advocacy was present at the time the event occurred. Since we are given no indication of where her or her mother works, we don’t know the community in which they work. If someone is working for a hospital in an upscale area, like Silicon Valley for instance, they likely have only experienced a hospital environment where the hospital is able to maintain these standards, and it is also less likely that they have experience with incidents of overt racism since such places tend to use that same staff to enact much more subtle racist action.





Furthermore, this assumes that the story wasn’t presented in a way that better fits twitter’s limited space restrictions; saying that the racist couple physically blocked her from treating a baby could function as a way to summarize the parents intervening in some more indirect way which lead to the child’s death, or it may be that a more “accurate” account is unable to convey the emotional impact of the experience. If it was something like, “I was tasked with performing this procedure, but the parents specifically demanded that there be no black nurses allowed, and in the time it took to negotiate with the parents to hand over the baby, it died.” can be the emotional equivalent to the experience of being physically barred by those parents from doing one’s duty, and it doesn’t convey the experience to maintain that level of accuracy, so even if we momentarily entertain that her account is not entirely true, it does not mean that racism did not kill that child. Same goes for being the only one able to do the procedure. No matter how well staffed a hospital is, certain staff members will develop certain skills/specializations and if one person can do one thing more effectively than others on duty, they might as well be the only one who can do it.

Finally, stepping down or removing something aren’t evidence or admission of guilt, and considering the risks involved in exposing the racial dynamics of both your profession and personal life, if she deleted the Tweets in response to the reaction she got, it doesn’t seem reasonable to automatically assume it was because she was caught in a lie. Though the original tweeter hasn’t given any information that supports her claims, assuming she is telling the truth, she’s likely emotionally compromised and probably wasn’t thinking “Oh, I should probably attach a photo of my hospital ID and most recent paystub to confirm my identity.” That she is being subjected to this level of scrutiny is no accident. You don’t spend very much time in any marginalized community before you see how the words of oppressors, even when they are pushing a very clear agenda, are taken as absolute truth (for my followers, see the “down with cis” bus) while the oppressed have to provide more information than is demanded by the damn IRS to prove the shitty things that happen to them.

So, if the nurse lied, why? What does she have to gain? Are we to assume she didn’t know that, if the tweets were noticed, that the backlash would be immeasurable? I don’t know of a single person in a vulnerable, marginalized position who doesn’t take to social networking with at least something close to an understanding of that fact, so it seems highly unlikely. On the other hand, there is considerable social benefit in facilitating the hand-waving away of things like this because then it advances the dominant narrative that more egregious forms of bigotry are all pure fabrication. Of course this couldn’t happen in a hospital, of course parents wouldn’t do such a thing, racism is purely a matter of the withholding of rights, it doesn’t seep into the very fabric of our civil institutions and family structures – it is cathartic to have these ideas confirmed, and so people who provide the means to perpetuate them, intentionally or otherwise, are not going to be as heavily scrutinized as those who cast them into doubt. Maybe this nurse lied, maybe she didn’t, but considering that the OP has provided as much proof as the tweets she is supposedly debunking, I feel we need to hold back before we all start proclaiming how obviously fake we all think the original tweets were.