Nothing About This is Okay

This story starts four-plus years ago.

My wife (still my girlfriend at the time) had an incident at work where she and a customer at a reputable retail outlet got conked in their heads by a falling sign. Amazingly, the customer didn’t sue, and my wife got let out of work early. We weren’t living in the same city at the time—she had just moved to Seattle, and I hadn’t yet—but she came up to Bellingham as scheduled. When she told me what happened, we made our way to the emergency room right away. It’s at this point that I should mention that my wife has a distinct and sizable birthmark on her right cheek. It’s called a port wine stain due to its purplish color. So, yeah, it looks like a bruise.

This means when an ER doctor sees something abnormal on a woman’s face, and her significant other is twice her size, AND the woman’s primary complaint is head trauma, it’s natural to assess if there’s something more to the story. Every person in a healthcare system with a patient-facing role is trained to subtly determine signs of domestic violence or other kinds of abuse; if abuse is suspected, we’re taught to isolate the patient from the potential abuser.

That is not what happened.

The doctor entered the treatment room and, after confirming the reason she was there, did a brief physical assessment: he took one look at her birthmark and said, “Seems pretty obvious where you were hit.”

While giving me some serious side-eye.

My wife corrected him, telling him that the thing on her face was a birthmark and that the actual trauma was on her head. The doctor took a half-turn to look me in the eye while asking her, “Are you sure?”

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago. After a day spent inside painting our bedroom, my wife and I set out to go to a local Cajun festival. Although it was late in the day and the event was winding down, you could still hear the joyous sounds of live Jazz and the smell of jambalaya hung in the air. As we crossed the street to find the entrance to the event, my toe and shoe caught the lip of a rail track. I stumbled forward a few steps, trying to right myself, then faceplanted onto the asphalt. After taking a second to assess the damage—lip busted open, sore right wrist, a left knee that was unhappy about the events—and count my teeth (all present and accounted for), my wife drove me to the emergency room. Talking became hard for me as my lip swelled, and I was busy trying to keep the blood from going to too many places, so she did all the talking for me.

And that was how *this* happened

After intake was done, the receptionist asked my wife with a raised eyebrow, “Did you hit him? Did he leave the toilet seat up again?”

The first time someone made that joke, it was met with an awkward laugh and a polite restatement of the events. The second time, it was met with an eye roll. The next three times, it was met with an angry glare, and in the moments that we were alone, my wife would ask me, "Why is that joke okay?”

My response was, “It’s not.”

So, let’s dissect this. Putting aside some of the other factors involved in our respective ER visits that might require a different, longer, and more heated debate, why is it that in a hospital setting, a female potential victim of domestic violence is treated with an urge to protect and ensure safety, while a male potential victim is treated with derision or like he had it coming?

It is worth noting that aside from the interactions I had mentioned, the ER staffs provided exemplary care in both situations, with prompt mitigation of the acute issues, the right meds prescribed for pain management, and good advice for aftercare dispensed. The techs and attending physicians did their jobs very well. That much I’m happy with. As far as the handling of something as serious as domestic violence, they need to be made aware that none of what happened is okay. This isn’t the forum to do it, however, which is why I left the names of the hospitals involved out of this.