Nescientist @[email protected]

@Shadowman311 @Ghislaine your protocol when somebody you care about is in the hospital:

do not leave them alone (arrange to stay in the room if possible, or at least in the waiting area, and be “present” at regular intervals)
DO NOT LEAVE THEM ALONE
make friends with the care staff, especially the nurses; the doctors too, if you can, but you cannot afford to alienate the nurses, so be your best and most charming self (don’t be sexual about it unless, you know, it’s working for you…. then go nuts, just make sure you wrap it because nurses are whores); play the “sympathy” card, too, but not too much or it stops working real quick
do the homework - when you’re not sleeping or bringing food (hospital food is shit), you should be reading as much as you can on your phone about the issue, treatments, and related medical things so you can intelligently ask questions and make your case; don’t go all “Dr. Google”, but get an idea of what the issues and tradeoffs are; this also means that you are in a much better position to catch a mistake if and when it’s being made
after doing the homework, be as reasonable as you can be under the circumstances - if you argue over every pissy little thing, or are too retardedly wrong too often, you’re going to get tagged quickly as being “one of those“ (i.e. you will become identified as “the nigger table” by your medical waitress) and you will be shunted to the side effortlessly and instantly
if you have objections to anything, frame them in terms of tradeoffs, and accept the ones that aren’t ‘important’ in the situation; there’s a reason the patient is in the hospital instead of your living room, after all, so generally the medical folks are probably going to have something close to the best idea in the situation for how to deal with things because they usually know a bunch of shit you don’t know, but ultimately they don’t have any real skin in the game (they go home at the end of their shift with fat stacks); they have lots of patients to care about and you have only one, so your job is to keep them on-task and on-point, and to be a somewhat-disinterested observer catching mistakes before they happen
if you have hard objections, have (or find) reasons for those objections that are at least superficially medically-relevant in a context they find acceptable; “a family history of X” (where X has at least some tangential relevance to the issue at hand) is a thin figleaf to defend against something you don’t want (e.g. a vaccine), but can make a difference between the issue being forced upon the patient and it being delayed, and frequently “delay” is all you need (“tincture of time” serving you well here); remember that the “precautionary principle” is very much a thing and once you voice a legitimate concern based on at least plausible biology, they now have a problem in compelling certain things, because there is now a record that you told them it may be a bad idea and they are now responsible if ANYTHING goes south on them as a result
although you should definitely be making yourself informed via other sources, seek to be informed as much as possible without being tedious; if you ask intelligent questions genuinely and in a spirit of “wanting to know more”, you will get higher-quality explanations and more buy-in to your opinions and desires
be helpful - if you’re identified as “being useful” when it comes time to do something unpleasant (holding for a needle-stick, handling bathroom trips, getting food and such) then you become somebody they want to keep involved in the equation, since it means that the patient is getting better care and they’re doing less work
don’t take bait and don’t make threats; if you threaten anything, make them legal threats and couch them in terms of “well gosh I wish I didn’t have to do this BUT I guess I have to get the lawyers involved and man this sucks! I wish we could come to some kind of agreement, I just want do what’s best for (the patient) so they get the best outcome here”; you want them feeling like you’re on their side and they’re being unreasonable, i.e. coopting their usual “compliance” pattern
on that topic and in general, center everything on “the patient’s welfare”, since that is the ostensible North Star for all medical actions taken; you’re not “standing on your rights”, which can be argued, you’re “ensuring the patient gets the best outcome possible”, which can’t

you (or your loved one) stand to suffer injury or death as a result of bad medicine, and in these days there are some ways in which the medical-industrial complex can be very hostile if you are not judicious in your actions, but! fortunately, you are playing chess with people who stand to lose a lot personally if they fuck up; therefore be as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove and you can generally make it out okay, so long as you know where the usual landmines are and steer around them, which isn’t too difficult