Life as a medical student has had its ups and downs for Kychelle Del Rosario. The doctor-in-training from Wake Forest University in North Carolina recently sparked controversy after a patient at the hospital mocked her pronoun badge that said “She/Her” on it. According to a statement released by the university, Del Rosario attacked the patient for mocking the badge – but instead of getting thrown out of the school, it seems like the “woke” student will be back doing rounds in no time.
The medical student explained that she deliberately missed a male patient’s vein while performing a blood draw because he made fun of her ID badge and how it said: “she” and “her” on it – which indicate her preferred pronouns.
Now, the medical student has shifted her story, claiming that she accidentally missed the patient’s vein – and had not done it on purpose to get revenge on him for making fun of her badge. However, some people on social media fear that the Wake Forest University medical student changed her story simply to save her medical career.
As a result of Del Rosario’s tweet, Wake Forest conducted an investigation into her behavior and backed the “woke” student, claiming that the content of her tweets did not reflect what happened in the hospital with the male patient.
Although Twitter users had mixed reactions to Del Rosario’s Twitter “confession,” other students at her university rallied behind her, another medical student, Ewen Liu, believes that the man had to get stuck twice because it was a “karma-tic” reaction to him having made fun of Del Rosario’s name badge.
Meanwhile, Wake Forest University School of Medicine claimed that they launched an investigation into the incident as soon as their leaders became aware of Del Rosario’s tweet, which stated: “I had a patient I was doing a blood draw on to see my pronoun pin and loudly laugh to the staff ‘She/her? Well, of course, it is! What other pronouns even are there? It?’ I missed his vein, so he had to get stuck twice.”
The university statement said, “Our documentation verifies that after the student physician was unsuccessful in obtaining the blood draw, the student appropriately deferred a second attempt to one of our certified professionals. The student did not attempt to draw blood again.”
Despite it all being an “accident,” according to the “woke” student, she issued an apology that stated the following.
“I am writing this as an apology for a very irresponsible tweet that I sent on Twitter that I highly regret. For the event mentioned in the tweet, I was performing a blood draw on a patient, and during our conversation, they had shown dismay at my pronoun pin. I calmly shared my thoughts about pronouns and did not escalate the situation further. When I was doing the blood draw, I missed the first time due to my inexperience as a student, and per our policy, my supervisor performed the successful blood draw the second time. During this encounter, I never intended to harm the patient. I am truly sorry for poorly representing our school and our health system. I will reflect on responsible social media use as a professional and my duty to care for all my patients, regardless of any differences of belief.”