Dr. Amanti at Boston Medical Center

November 10, 2014

When I was at the Emergency Room at Boston Medical Center weeks ago, waiting to be interviewed by a psychiatric clinician, several Boston Medical Center staff people harassed me.  The first was a young woman who seemed to be a medical assistant.  She coughed at me several times.  I told her to stop coughing at me.  A janitor found things to do around me; I told him to leave me alone.

My objections to being abused culminated in someone named Dr. Amanti standing over me, telling me that everyone around me was just doing his or her job, that they couldn't help coughing, and that I had to stop being disruptive by objecting to their behavior.  I think he would have continued to admonish me if I hadn't gotten his name from his name tag and told him that I was going to write about him online.  He then retreated to the desk, where he laughed and asked a resident doctor "What's her diagnosis?"  He did that, of course, to try to get a psychiatric diagnosis as an answer so that he could discredit me in front of everyone and continue to allow me to be psychologically abused in the Emergency Room.

Dr. Amanti left the room for a while.  While he was gone, another male doctor who had already coughed at me several times stood about 10 feet away from me, coughing deafeningly during the entire time that the spouse or friend of a patient in the ER was trying to talk to him about that patient.

I finally said to that doctor "You are supposed to be listening to the person next to you who is trying to talk to you about your patient, not standing there coughing at me."

Soon after this, Dr. Amanti was standing over me again.  He finally went away, but the abuse didn't stop.

The abuse never stops.  Being treated with any courtesy at all anywhere is now something that makes a situation memorable for me.

There was another female patient in the ER that night whom staff were ridiculing also, right in front of her as if she were deaf or too stupid to understand what they were saying and how they were saying it.  She got upset and left; they laughed about that, also.

Copyright L. Kochman, November 10, 2014 @ 5:12 p.m.