Undiagnosed ADHD symptom nobody talks about: you forget a person's name the second after they introduce themselves. Not because you don't care. Because your brain was already busy processing the handshake, the eye contact, and the noise in the room.
He drove his wife to one of the best hospitals in America for a planned caesarean. A routine one. Her second.
Charles Johnson watched her blood collect in a catheter bag for ten hours while he asked for help.
Kira Johnson died at 2:22am.
Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, 12th April 2016. Kira Johnson was 39. She spoke five languages, raced cars, ran marathons. The caesarean was scheduled. Everything about it was routine.
Her son Langston was delivered at midday.
By the afternoon her husband could see blood in her catheter. He told a nurse. He was told they would check.
He asked again. And again. A CT scan was ordered and then not performed. He has described being told, at one point, that his wife was simply not a priority right now.
He stood in a corridor for ten hours asking people to look at his wife.
They took her back to theatre just after midnight. There were three litres of blood in her abdomen. She died shortly after.
Her son Langston was twelve hours old.
Charles Johnson has spent the decade since as one of the most effective advocates in American maternal health. He founded 4Kira4Moms. He has testified before Congress. The federal Black maternal health legislation introduced in recent years carries work he pushed for.
He talks about one thing more than any other, and it is not the medicine.
It is the ten hours. He was standing right there, in the building, awake, articulate, asking. And it made no difference at all.
@mikeharmony1954@debatereaction You wouldn’t catch an attitude if someone came into your work space cussing and being rude. So many excuses for an individual who should not be allowed to engage with society this way. If the roles were reversed, first to be enraged?!!!?
@mikeharmony1954@debatereaction How are you not going to catch an attitude when someone is cussing and rude from the jump? Making so many excuses for someone who shouldn’t be allowed to engage in society this way. If someone talked to you like that - you would be the first to be enraged.