#I told a clinician who was looking at my knee the other month that I was trans (cause they always ask abt all meds n diagnoses)

[dkettchen]

[socialjusticeartshare]

Immigrant Teens Say They're Being Forcibly Drugged in US Custody

"When I get mad they give me shots."

In October 2019, a teenage boy crossed the U.S. border into Arizona alone, fleeing for his life after being assaulted and threatened by gang members in Mexico. He’d hoped to find safety in the U.S, but instead, according to court filings, he ended up at a Texas children’s hospital where he’s been heavily sedated and forcibly injected multiple times over the past six months.

When an attorney visited the 16-year-old in November, she described him as having “a glazed over, vacant expression much of the time.” He told her he’d been taking around 20 pills per day.

“I want to leave because when I get mad they give me shots,” said the boy, whose name is redacted in the public court filings. “I think the last time was about a month ago. When they give me a shot, it makes me feel sad. And then I will sleep for a day. When I wake up after, I feel desperate. My body feels desperate.” 

In the last months of the Trump administration, other immigrant youth in government custody have been drugged and isolated for long periods, according to court records. The documents describe children languishing for months, including a young “nonverbal” girl who was separated from her father at the border over a year ago and is now unable to directly communicate with her family in Guatemala.

The shocking descriptions, which have not previously been reported, were filed as part of a long-running lawsuit against the federal government over its treatment of “unaccompanied minors,” children who arrive at the border alone, often fleeing violence or abuse in Central America. Lawyers in the case say six such kids in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) were held indefinitely at Nexus Children’s Hospital in Houston, with at least three placed on “excessive medication.” 

Leecia Welch, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, visited Nexus on Nov. 13 and initially found it to be “a typical medical facility” for children, with brightly colored hallways and an outdoor play area, according to a declaration she filed in federal court. But when she began speaking with three kids in the behavioral health wing at Nexus, Welch noticed they appeared to be groggy and dazed. 

Welch, who noted that she has interviewed “hundreds of children in government custody,” including in psychiatric hospitals, said the 16-year-old told her he had trouble sleeping, a problem he never had in Mexico and attributed to his heavy medications. He described spending hours alone in his room watching TV, and leaving for therapy, meals, and activities, but never school. 

“I do not have school here,” he said. “I have not had any school at Nexus the entire time I have been here.”

Know anything about conditions in migrant detention centers? Email keegan.hamilton@vice.com or carter.sherman@vice.com.

It was a stark contrast to the shelter in Arizona where the boy had first been housed in the U.S., which he said allowed a trip to the museum and more time outdoors. Then, in January 2020, he described being awoken at 3 a.m. and told to pack his things. He was sent to a more restrictive facility in Washington state, which he said did not allow him outside. His next stop was Nexus, where he said staff had also placed him in physical restraints.

“When I get angry, I know how to calm myself,” he said. “They use physical restraints when I get angry but that makes me angrier. But it’s been a month that I haven’t been angry. I am doing better. I was told I would leave soon.”

A fifteen-year-old that Welch interviewed “appeared to be so overmedicated he could barely talk or maintain eye contact” during their 20-minute conversation. The boy’s speech was slurred, and he mostly “lay in bed drooling and staring blankly at his TV,” Welch wrote. “He did look at me intensely for one brief moment and asked when he could go home.”

A spokesperson for the Department Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, which oversees ORR, declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

A spokesperson for Nexus Health Systems, which runs Nexus Children’s Hospital, gave a statement saying the company “has provided superior medical care to children for over 20 years.”

 “Although due to healthcare privacy constraints we cannot comment on the care of specific patients, we stand by our clinicians’ decision-making and our associated clinical policies and procedures,” the statement said. “Nexus’ focus in every case is—and will remain—the well-being of our patients.”

As part of a 1997 court settlement known as the Flores agreement, federal authorities are supposed to transfer unaccompanied minors from Border Patrol custody to a state-licensed childcare facility within 72 hours, or release them to a relative or sponsor living in the U.S. But in some instances, these children require more intensive care than a typical group home or shelter can provide due to medical or behavioral issues. 

Nexus describes itself on its website as “a child’s home away from home during recovery from complex medical issues,” including those with behavioral problems “who may have been unsuccessful in traditional rehabilitation environments.” According to court filings, Nexus is an “out-of-network facility” that contracts with ORR to care for immigrant youth until they can be sent elsewhere, such as a foster home in the U.S., a group home with a less-intensive level of care, or back to their home country on a deportation flight.

Intensive hospital stays are supposed to be brief—usually only a few days until the child is stabilized and can return to a more normal setting. But four of the six kids that Welch found at Nexus had been there for longer than six months.

She described meeting a 15-year-old girl who’d been sent to Nexus “due to her weight, diabetes, and issues with her knees.” The girl said she’d been at the hospital for seven months and was still being held there even after meeting a weight loss goal set by a doctor, which she was told would allow her to leave. The girl said she preferred the freezing-cold Border Patrol “hielera” holding cell where she was first detained after crossing the border.

“I liked the hielera better than here because of how they treat people here,” the girl said. “It’s not well. They don’t treat people well. They try to be rude to me, but I don’t let them get away with it. They are not nice to the other kids.”

The mother of a fourth immigrant child held at Nexus, described by Welch as a 2-year-old with “very serious medical needs,” declined to speak with the attorney. As Welch prepared to leave the Houston facility, she said staff mentioned they had a fifth patient who came from federal government custody and had been there “a very long time.” 

Welch described being led to a section of the hospital for kids with more intensive physical health needs and entering a room to find “a small child with perfectly coiffed pigtails under a pink Minnie Mouse blanket.” The girl, Welch said, “was connected to machines and was unable to move or establish eye contact.” 

The girl appeared to be well cared for, but Welch later learned she had been separated from her father in August 2019 after they crossed the border together. Her father, Welch said, “was deported before his daughter was in a position to safely return to home country with him; they remain separated and without any direct contact.”

Welch noted that, “although this child has now lived far longer than her predicted life expectancy, her long-term prognosis remains poor, and without swift intervention, she and her father may never see one another again.”

Welch declined to be interviewed, citing the pending litigation, but said the government needs to do a better job of monitoring and tracking the care that children receive. 

“We just don't know how many other children are going into hospital settings and having these things happen,” Welch said. “Even if ORR wanted to, they couldn't go online and tell you, ‘This many kids have been forcibly injected over the last six months.’ They just don't have the data; I find it horrifying. It's just a black box.”

Robert Carey, who led ORR under the Obama administration, said he could not recall any incidents during his tenure where immigrant youth were subjected to forced injections. Carey said such measures would only be appropriate as a last resort in cases where children had “severe mental health needs.”

“At minimum, an investigation would be conducted to determine if in fact that was happening and, if so, why, and what oversight was being conducted or in place by ORR staff,” Carey said.

Carey said he expects the incoming Biden administration to overhaul ORR, which falls under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services. Under Trump, the agency has been involved in multiple scandals, including the failure to reunite families that were separated at the border under the so-called “zero tolerance” policy.

“Children have been poorly treated, obviously. Laws and standards appear to have been violated. It’s not good.”

“It’s been politicized,” Carey said. “Children have been poorly treated, obviously. Laws and standards appear to have been violated. It’s not good.”

The Nexus allegations aren’t the first time the Trump administration has been accused of providing questionable medical treatment to immigrant youth. In April 2018, plaintiffs in the Flores case filed court documents describing how multiple children at Shiloh Treatment Center near Houston were held down and injected with psychotropic medications. In one incident, a girl claimed a Shiloh staff member threw her against a wall and choked her until she fainted. 

Shiloh issued a statement in 2018 denying any wrongdoing and maintaining that children at the facility “have been found to be properly cared for and treated.” The judge overseeing the Flores case ordered the government to abide by Texas laws on the  administration of drugs to minors, and to remove them from Shiloh unless they pose “a risk of harm to self or others,” a determination to be made by a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist.

Scott Lloyd, a former ORR director under Trump, told VICE News that forcibly medicating minors can be justified in cases where they have severe mental health issues and may be behaving aggressively. He emphasized that staffers, operating in deeply difficult situations, typically have the best interests of children at heart.

“As bad as it sounds, when you get down into the details of it, it’s actually something that you see happening every day in families,” said Lloyd, who was first thrust into the spotlight after he personally refused to let detained immigrant girls undergo abortions, spurring an ACLU lawsuit. “Even when it’s antibiotics, sometimes kids just don’t want to take drugs, but that’s just what they need at the moment. And on top of that, you have teenagers who just don’t want to do anything that you tell them to do because they’re teenagers.”

A 2018 report by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that housing and supervising immigrant children for the federal government is big business, with $3.4 billion paid out to 71 companies, including Shiloh, over a four-year period. Nearly half of that money went to homes with serious allegations of mistreating children, Reveal found, including shelters accused of neglect and sexual and physical abuse.

Beyond the Flores case, forced injections have been a point of litigation in a separate class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of immigrant youth held in “highly restrictive psychiatric facilities” and jail-like “secure” detention centers. The suit claims kids end up trapped in such places for months or years, with no hearings or protections to provide a path out.

“I felt like I had no one to help me and no option but to take the daily medication,” said one child quoted in court records. In that case, staff at Shiloh would allegedly “force the child’s mouth open if they tried to refuse to take the medication.” Others were given forced injections. 

“Two staff grabbed me, and the doctor gave me an injection despite my objection and left me there on the bed,” one child said, according to court filings.

Since March 21, the Trump administration has turned away thousands of unaccompanied minors on the grounds that they present “a serious danger of the further introduction of COVID-19” into the U.S. Under an order signed by Trump, at least 8,300 children who traversed the border alone have been detained by the Border Patrol and sent back to Mexico or their home countries, according to CBP data provided to lawyers in the Flores case.

The same bunch of Nov. 23 court filings that detail the situation at Nexus also describe grim conditions at a Border Patrol outpost in Weslaco, Texas. A lawyer in the Flores case visiting to monitor conditions found an 8-year-old boy from Guatemala who said he’d been separated from his mother for two days. They crossed the border together, he said, but she was sick and could barely walk. The boy saw his mother loaded onto an ambulance, while he ended up as the only child on a bus full of adults headed for a Border Patrol station, where he’d been waiting for her since.

“I am alone in my room,” the boy said. “I do not know why I am alone. It makes me feel abandoned. I feel very alone. I have been completely alone for an entire day. I am sleeping on a cushion that is on the floor. I do not have a pillow, but I do have a thin silver nylon blanket. I use my coat as a pillow. I am the only one in the room when I sleep. It is very cold. It is always very cold.”

Asked about the court filings, Tom Gresback, a spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Rio Grande Valley, said: “As a matter of policy, CBP does not comment on pending litigation. Lack of comment should not be construed as agreement or stipulation with any of the allegations.” 

In September alone, according to CBP data referenced in court filings, at least 36 kids were held in Border Patrol stations for more than three days, including 16 for over five days. Among them were a 6-month-old infant (held 13 days), a 5-month-old infant (15 days), and a 2-month-old infant (16 days). The monitor who visited the Weslaco station said children reported being housed in cells with 16-20 others, with no social distancing, soap, or hand sanitizer.

“Many children reported that they were very cold,” wrote the monitor, Denise A. Rosales. “During an interview, one child commented on how nice the sun was. She said she had not seen the sun in over two days.”

In a Dec. 4 court hearing in the Flores case, attorneys for immigrant youth and the government said they are close to finalizing a settlement agreement that could lead to “steps forward” on conditions for unaccompanied minors detained at the border. 

The issues of forced injections and lengthy stays in restrictive psychiatric or jail-like settings are being litigated in a separate case, with a trial currently set for March. In the meantime, the 16-year-old who’d been forcibly injected still remains at Nexus.

The teen said he hopes to leave the hospital soon. He has plans for his life.    

“I will be happy when they give me the good news that I'm leaving this place,” the boy said. “My dream is to be a firefighter. It's my dream to help people.”

Article Source

[mrlongkgraves]

A gymnast gets her spring back

Mikayla on the uneven bars at age 11, two years before she mastered the pirouette [PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE COMEIRO FAMILY]

In order to master the pirouette, Mikayla Comeiro drew on many of the strengths she’d developed as a competitive gymnast: hours of practice, determination and physical stamina. To perform a pirouette, the gymnast swings herself into a handstand on the uneven bars and walks her hands around in a circle, rotating her entire body while remaining upside down.

Mikayla worked on the skill last summer and executed the move at a competition in Virginia this past winter. “I love the feeling of success when you work really hard and do well at a competition,” she says. It was a satisfying comeback from the hip injury that forced Mikayla to take six months off from any sort of practice or competition last year.

Mikayla competing at age 9

Mikayla, who is now 13, first got involved in gymnastics at the age of 2, when she and her father attended parent-child classes together. “I just kept doing it and got really into it,” she explains. As Mikayla excelled, the sport became more demanding. During any given week, she and her teammates practice five days a week, for a total of 19 hours.

Ignoring her injury

When she first felt pain in her left hip, Mikayla waited it for it to go away. Instead of getting better, however, the pain got worse. Eventually the pain grew so bad, she could barely walk. “It was hard to say something to my parents,” says Mikayla. “The pain had been going on for so long, I knew it was going to be something bad.” When she finally spoke up, her mother, Kim, brought her to see Dr. Lyle Micheli.

The Comeiro family knew Dr. Micheli well by then. Mikayla had been his patient in the Performing Artists Athlete Program for injuries to her foot, ankle, knee and back. “Gymnastics puts a lot of stress on the body,” says Kim, who knows from experience that injuries are a fact of life for competitive gymnasts. When neither physical therapy nor crutches relieved Mikayla’s hip pain, Dr. Micheli referred her to Dr. Sarah Jackson in the Sports Ultrasound Clinic.

Mikayla defies gravity at age 11

A look inside the joint in motion

Sports ultrasound uses sound waves to create images of muscles, ligaments and joints as patients move them. This dynamic view enables clinicians to diagnose injuries with greater accuracy and begin appropriate treatment sooner.

In Mikayla’s case, the ultrasound revealed she had an avulsion fracture in her left hip. Avulsion fractures are particularly common in young athletes, who are prone to overuse injuries. Over time, rigorous training can cause a separation at the growth plate that lies between a large bone, such as the hip bone, and a small chunk of bone. Typically, the small chunk of bone grows into the larger bone as the child grows. But when an athlete puts continued stress on the area, the tendon pulls the growth plate and the small chunk of bone away from the larger bone.

Non-surgical hip repair

Dr. Jackson and her colleague Pierre d’Hemecourt determined that a platelet rich plasma (PRP) injection had a reasonable chance of healing Mikayla’s hip. PRP is a type of regenerative medicine, which repairs damaged tissues by triggering the body’s natural growth factors to help repair the damaged tissue. “She called us on a Sunday to give us their opinion,” says Kim. “That gave me a lot of confidence in her commitment.”

One problem remained, however. Despite an unusually high pain threshold, Mikayla does not like needles. “I was very nervous,” she admits. By then, however, she had been in pain and unable to practice for three months. Her teammates were learning new skills while she fell further and further behind. Her other treatment option would have been surgery, possibly with the use of screws, to repair her hip. She and her parents decided to give PRP injection a try.

Mikayla chats with her coach at age 13

On the day of the procedure, Dr. Jackson drew blood from Mikayla’s arm. Then, using a centrifuge, clinicians separated out the platelets so they could be injected into Mikayla’s injured hip. Using ultrasound technology, Dr. Jackson guided the needle directly into the damaged area. “She had to get the needle between two bones in an area that was very inflamed,” says Kim, who alternated between watching the screen and watching her daughter’s face. “It was clear Mikayla was uncomfortable.”

A long weekend

The whole family held its breath that weekend, waiting to see if Mikayla’s pain would go away. “The treatment was on Friday,” remembers Kim. “Saturday and Sunday were miserable.” Then, on Tuesday morning, something remarkable happened. “I asked Mikayla the same question I’d been asking her for several months, how’s your hip? For the first time, she told me she was not in pain.”

Recovering smarter, not harder

True to form, Mikayla wanted to return to the gym right away. Instead, she heeded Dr. Jackson’s advice and gave her hip time to heal. Six weeks later, in late July, she finally returned to practice. Even then, she had to avoid all jumping and other high-impact exercises for another month.

Mikayla returned to her sport, and victory, after recovering from a hip avulsion fracture

Looking back, Mikayla says she would go through the procedure again, even though she’s still no fan of needles. “My hip was in pain for 12 weeks and nothing else was working,” she says, adding, “The entire time, I was not able to do gymnastics.”

New skills, on and off the mat

Since her recovery, in addition to the pirouette, Mikayla has mastered the 1.5 punch. The move involves a round off, a jump, a front tuck and a one-and-a-half twist in midair. Then, the instant her feet touch the mat, she launches into another jump, flips and sticks her landing. “Adding the second jump wasn’t hard but it took me three months to learn the twist,” she says.

  ​

Kim is proud, relieved and interested in teaching her daughter the skill of self-knowledge. “Mikayla’s learning to listen to her body,” she says. “She knows, if there’s a problem, she needs to say something before it becomes severe.” She pauses, then adds, “It’s a work in progress.”

Learn more about the Performing Artist Athletes Program and the Sports Ultrasound Clinic.

The post A gymnast gets her spring back appeared first on Thriving Blog.

from Thriving Blog https://ift.tt/2JIyoje

[claireverbeck]

How I Learned to Love My Body Hair

I'm a hairy person. I don't really remember a time when I wasn't. By nine or ten years old, my legs were vertical forests. I wore shorts to school every chance I got. Other kids were mystified by my premature leg hair: did I shampoo it? Did it ever tangle? What did the breeze feel like on my legs?

I was proud.

That changed somewhere around age thirteen, when my pubescent insecurities were especially swollen and tender. A well-meaning loved one, who happened to be a bit further along the stream of adolescence, told me that body hair was a source of shame. The only people who had hairy legs were men, and I wasn't one of those. In order to fit in and be a "normal" girl as I transferred to a new middle school, I had to shave.

So I did. After an hour and two single-blade Bic razors, my legs were smooth (if a little bloody). I proudly felt like I was growing up, though I also felt a heavy sense of loss. Without my hair, I was paradoxically more a "woman" and less a "child."

I continued shaving for years. I would spend an hour in the shower every weekend, trying my hardest to obtain the satiny smooth legs all my female classmates had. At several points, I even used Nair on my arms (my arms!). I had become increasingly ashamed of my own body.

During a routine sports physical toward the end of high school, a clinician noticed my hair. She quickly recommended that I be tested for PCOS, or poly-cystic ovarian syndrome. After the tests came back negative, I instead received an official diagnosis of hirsutism. This was an enormous blow to my teenaged ego: how was I supposed to be a real and beautiful woman if I looked like a werewolf?

Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that beauty, femininity, and body hair were not mutually exclusive. I wish I could point to a singular epiphany, but in reality, I think I just got tired of shaving my legs. I stopped about a year ago, at first as a sort of "screw you" to the patriarchal world outside Wellesley. I wanted to spend my time writing, or playing the guitar, or reading. I didn't want to be forced into diverting my precious attention to my appearance. Plus, it was wintertime so my legs would be mostly, safely hidden. Before long, though, spring reared its colorful head, daring me to maintain the hair that had populated my legs. I could only wear pants for so long.

I stubbornly decided to try not giving a fuck.

The first day I wore a knee-length dress to work, I was beyond uncomfortable. Everyone in my male-dominated workplace could see my hair, exposed and vulnerable. But I stuck it out. Shaving was no longer worthwhile. I hated feeling obligated to use my time in pursuit of an arbitrary beauty standard, one which I hadn't chosen for myself. I hated spending money on razors. I hated being itchy. And I was beginning to enjoy the defiant feeling that grew along with my body hair. I found amusement in each stolen glance at my legs. I could tell that, for a lot of eyes, my swishy dresses and body hair didn't fit into the visual prototype of "feminine."

I loved that.

Months later, my leg hair is still dense. I recently epilated my armpits, an extraordinarily painful and familiar process. I don't regret either decision. As I grow outside the Wellesley bubble, I feel increasingly empowered to make deliberate choices about my appearance. I seldom wear makeup, but when I do, it's because I want to. Following that same logic, I'm confident that if I shave again, I'll do so for my own motivations, and not for anyone else.

There are still plenty of days when I wonder how it would feel to have barren legs, but I've reached a point where my time and money seem too valuable to waste on shaving. My leg hair has become a symbol of my strength, my confidence, and my womanhood. I've reclaimed that loss for my insecure thirteen-year-old self. For the first time in my life, I can say that I'm genuinely unapologetic for my human body and all its hairy splendor.

As I wrap this up, I'm curious to hear other perspectives on grooming, especially as it pertains to gender. Do you shave/wax/epilate/etc.? What are your motivations for/against doing so? Have these changed over time?

Leave a comment and we'll have a conversation.

As always, thank you for reading.

[itsyueko]

7.31.17 \\ 21:49 Northwestern Medicine Patient Care Planning #EarlyMobilityProgramProject #NorthwesternLakeForestHospitalProfessionalPracticeModel 

Ever since I woke up from my nap, I went over my manager’s annual eval. comments from when we had gone over it in her office earlier today. I was deeply considering participation in any projects as a pre-nursing student since I’m internal and have access to these resources (I thought of doing this when they had gone over it during orientation training). One of my patients was a charge nurse here in acute care and told me how she started at lake forest and went to school at clc too and told me about their reimbursement program. I have this 20 page something copy of the reimbursement guide and am considering this since it’s available to us within three months of hire (i think... i’ll have to look into it to see).

Basically, I’m interested in the early mobility program right now as well as Huddle and bedside shift reports. And other engagement type projects. I’ve been commended for getting patients up in the chair in the morning (Usually 4 hours after surgery PT/OT comes to visit the patient and have them do some certain activity level while the patient is still under stronger meds and anesthesia ). I’ve noticed that people who have trained me on nights just clean and do chores or the other q4 vitals throughout the shift. And I’ve noticed oncoming shift asks their patients if they want to get up in the chair as we do bedside shift report. SO having learned on time management, and the struggles of teamwork interaction lol with morning shift, I like getting my patients out of bed and having already prepared fresh linen for their chairs. I always receive positive comments for doing this and not just from staff but from the patients themselves. Especially when it means knowing they’re one step closer to going home and going back into their daily routines.

And over the course of 3 days (some of our ortho patients are known to have stayed on our unit for 3 days before getting the OK from the doctor to go home) they adapt and adjust to ways of maneuvering in and out of their rooms. Recently, I’ve learned to ask about the types of dressing they’re wearing and on what location. And if they have a vascutherm set up in their room (one of the renowned doctors on the unit already has a vascutherm sent to the rooms for knee patients for example). 

I’m excited and I’ve been told I should do some journaling about work (from Beth lol after our meeting) and my growth and positive feedbacks (including criticisms and guidance). So here’s an example and some notes I started jotting for ideas or for whatever questions I had to ask one of the nurse clinicians when I come back to work; just to ask about these projects even more and how to get started.