Fat & Communication

Today I've sat through a two-hour lecture on preeclamsia and a one-hour lecture on gestational diabetes. I feel like I've had these lectures several times... and I have... but still I don't feel like I know the information. I sometimes get distracted by the conversations that happen around the topic. Today I was distracted by the tone of fat bias in the classroom, especially during the gestational diabetes lecture. One comment was about an obese woman who had the nerve to continue to eat steak after her gestational diabetes diagnosis. Oh the nerve of this woman. Steak! Imagine. Now of course, steak- and meat in general- has come to symbolize all that people who eat differently than the majority of the folks enrolled do wrong. And of course we then get to sugar and refined carbs. And don't forget the dunkin donuts in the morning and the McDonalds for lunch and dinner that all of us fat people are eating every single day. (Seriously, this is what was said today about how overweight and fat women are eating... without any caveats, any "most" or "many" nomenclature, and with lots of classroom laughter) Lately I've begun to tune out the things that bother me in the classroom. I figure I don't have the energy to care about these things when I have so many more important things to learn in my 9 hour classroom day. But fat bias is one of those things that, as the only obese patient in my cohort, is hard to sit through. I think a great future research project would be to interview obese nursing/midwifery students about their experiences in the classrooms of the medical field. I think we'd get an earful. I rarely say anything in class about this because, come on, how predictable... the proud fat girl defending the other fat girls.

And, at this point, my relationship with my class has moved to a completely professional one. I no longer participate in weekly check-in, and I am so proud of myself for making this decision. It was important for my sanity, self-esteem, and overall happiness. After being called hostile multiple times by one student who then started crying per her usual emotional state and my supporting of her feelings about me- with an apology and a hug to calm her despite my disagreeing with her outburst, and feeling very attacked and unsupported myself- I realized that I sit through a lot of teary, "my cat is sick...my dog is dying" kind of check-ins. Check-ins that don't serve me at all because my brand of emotionality does not involve crying in front of strangers and lamenting in a "whatever am I going to do" kind of exasperation. I realized that unless I was crying about the kinds of things that matter to them, very little support was going to be offered, and very few of my cohort has the ability to respect different ways of communicating one's feelings. While I think that people who desire support have a responsibility to communicate that to those who might be able support her, I also think that people who would like to call themselves friends have a responsibility to at least consider observing when someone whose first instinct is not sobbing might be stressed herself.

The other day I wrote that we lost a student. The primary (and only as far as I witnessed) concern of many in my cohort was who would get her now-available call shifts. I was appalled. We lost someone. Someone who started this program with us is no longer with us. I feel like that deserved a moment of discussion about what we could/should/might do as a class to acknowledge this situation. I'm not talking about a sit-in to get her re-enrolled or anything dramatic like that. I'm talking about compassion... acknowledgment of the loss... reaching out to see if there's anything she wants to talk about... something. Something other than vying for her shifts.