(no subject)

howtospotahorse:

You can learn a lot about people from what tattoos they have. Inside the hospital, a patient’s tattoos can give you some valuable insight into their social history. IV drug users often get tattoos with some feature that identifies which vein they prefer to inject into. A common form of this is a scorpion with a tail that points to the vein. Check out this tattoo of a sun on the arm of one of our patients.

The longest ray on the sun points to his vein of choice.

This seems like terrible advice.  The last thing we need is to have half-trained med students over-analyzing people’s tattoos.  We need better, more compassionate, more humane treatment of drug users.  And a lot of infections and tissue damage that land people in the emergency room could be prevented by supervised injection spaces and access to targeted safer injection related medical information.

When I was in the SFGH emergency room after an OD (and was propped up in a chair because they didn’t have enough beds) a whole group of trainees (I think med students and residents) came up to me to talk about injection drug use, overdose, and narcan.  They hadn’t learned about any of this stuff in school, and I was sharing what I knew with them.  Which seemed kind of ironic, since I was going to be paying for the privilege of an ambulance ride I hadn’t wanted followed by sitting in a chair for four hours with no real contact with medical staff except being told by a doctor at the end of the night not to do drugs.  Maybe things have gotten better (that was in 1997) but I kind of doubt it.

Also, the injection site tattoo.  I mean, if someone only has one vein they use, it’s probably the one in the elbow of their non-dominant hand. And tattoos can make it harder to find the injection site, if you’re used to using visual cues.  And some people use tattoos to cover scars.  So I don’t see the point of medical tattoo analysis.

But, yeah, Michael had a target on his left elbow, because, you know, subtlety is over-rated.  And I was going to get a black widow on my arm after seeing Killing Zoe, but didn’t really have the money, and then Michael died, and I was going to get it on my stomach as a memorial piece, but could never settle on the design.

(no subject)

Talking to Nicole, I was hit with a wave of longing, not exactly for heroin, but for flirting with fellow druggies.  The coded phrases, the half smiles, the exchanged numbers and the clandestine meetings.

There are a lot of things that sucked about heroin – doing too much trying to keep up with Michael and feeling like, even through the opiate muffling, things really were falling apart and I couldn’t pull myself to figure out what to do, the feeling that it was getting harder and harder to see the big picture, to think creatively, like the walls of my brain were closing in on me, or just being hungover and throwing up until there was nothing left but a trickle of bitter yellow bile.

But, yeah, meeting some cute guy (or girl) and buying drugs from them was pretty much the best thing ever.