Med student who suggested she harmed patient for laughing at 'pronoun pin' placed on leave
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (TND) — A medical student at Wake Forest University suggested in a tweet that she purposefully blundered a patient’s blood draw because they laughed at a pro-trans “pronoun pin” she was wearing at the time.
“I had a patient I was doing a blood draw on 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,” read a tweet from fourth-year med student Kychelle Del Rosario.
A screenshot of the tweet was posted on Twitter, and users subsequently unloaded on her for the alleged malpractice.
The university, which initially said in a tweet that it was taking measures to address the incident, said in a later statement that Del Rosario did not accurately recall the incident in her tweet, according to Wake Forest’s campus newspaper.
“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," the school reportedly wrote.
Del Rosario was ultimately placed on a leave of absence “as a result of [an] inappropriate and misleading post,” the university’s school of medicine said in a statement, the campus newspaper reported.
She later issued a lengthy apology to the university, the campus paper also indicated, in which she blamed “inexperience,” and said she had never intended to harm the patient.
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," Del Rosario wrote in her statement. "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.
The National Desk reached out to Wake Forest University for comment, and to find out how long Del Rosario’s leave of absence would be, but did not immediately hear back prior to publication.
