Same Shit, Different Way

Exposing The Tactics Still Being Used to Tow The Status Quo.

Well good early morning to my Hebrew Israelite Brothers and Sisters scattered through the Earth. All praises to The Most High God Yahuah, and Son Yashua, Image of The Invisible God.

Do I have a story to tell.

Before I begin, most of you who have followed my posts for well over 10 years since my Awakening in 2015, and even some from before then, since I started this account in 2007, understand that I’m not usually in the practice of getting into too much personal detail about an event, an emergency, or something of true significance.

Some of us tell too much of our business on this platform, and I have had to learn from being one of those “some of us.”

This conveyance, however, seemed an extreme necessity this 22nd of September 2026.

So let me begin.

It’s September 22, 2026, at 3:10 in the morning here in Phoenix, Arizona, and I am recovering and being treated for a case of walking double pneumonia.

Yes, since Friday I had somehow developed fluid in both of my lungs, or had come in contact with something that set this off.

Not recognizing why I was not feeling well, I took all the wrong medication and did all the wrong things, which eventually resulted in walking double pneumonia.

I’m up here at Abrazo Scottsdale Campus on 40th Street and Bell Road, just a few miles from where I live. I got here because my wife Lena grew increasingly intolerant of my decision not to see a doctor about the symptoms she was watching her husband endure.

Friday night I couldn’t move without coughing, and the pain in my upper right back was excruciating. I couldn’t sleep, and whatever had me ill was keeping me from breathing, and a few times I thought I would actually pass out in the bedroom.

That week I was feverish and wasn’t hungry, but I had to work. That was Friday. Saturday was no better, and I was still refusing to see a doctor.

Sunday came and went, and towards the evening I started feeling better but still hadn’t eaten.

After I ate and prepared for bed, I started feeling bad again.

What I didn’t know was that my lungs were irritated and inflamed, and that my white blood cell count had increased as my body fought the infection.

I also didn’t know how serious pneumonia can get. People can die from it, including from complications like sepsis and respiratory failure.

After a rough night of no sleep and pain, I had to get up and work from home, which is what I do now.

As I worked, I noticed my ability to contain the pain was getting less and less successful.

It was at this point that Lena put her foot down and said, “You’re going to the doctor.”

And like most men who’ve been married for over 25 years, I listened to my wife, and I’m glad I did.

I let my boss know I was going to the emergency room, and just getting in the car showed me that I may have waited too late.

Lena drove me to the hospital, and I couldn’t walk in because at this point I needed wheelchair assistance.

That’s how bad the pain and my inability to breathe had become.

In just a few minutes I was registered, taken back into the ER patient area, and eventually x-rayed, only to be told by the doctor that I had walking double pneumonia.

Honestly, I thought it was appendicitis, or that my appendix was about to burst. I had no idea I was in that kind of medical emergency.

They began a battery of tests, including drawing blood, and then told me they would have to admit me because my blood oxygen was too low. My lungs, inflamed and irritated, were not able to deliver enough.

After a while they told me they were taking me to my room upstairs on the third floor.

My things were gathered, I was put on a gurney, taken up in an elevator, and assigned to room 324.

It’s a single-occupancy hospital room.

It’s nice, with everything someone recovering from an ailment like this might want.

It didn’t escape my notice that this was a pretty nice room, but I didn’t think much further than the fact that I have health insurance, they accepted it, and they knew getting paid for their services wouldn’t be a problem.

Up until this moment the staff was amazing: polite, courteous, accommodating, informative, thorough, professional, and obviously capable of managing this simple process of treatment and healing.

They were in and out of the room all night. They took eight vials of blood and gave me five bags of solutions, all meant to help clear my lungs so I could breathe without feeling like I was about to pass out.

I arrived at approximately 11:30 in the morning, and at this point in the story it’s about 5:15 in the afternoon.

I was told people would come into my room to give me medication in one way or another: by injection, by liquid, in pill form, and even in inhalers.

When I was told someone would come in at 1:00 in the morning to give me a treatment, I decided to stay up until then and sleep through the next day into the morning, so that I might be ready to leave.

On time and like clockwork, nurses came in to give me the treatment through the breathing apparatus, and I was comfortable and ready to rest, since I hadn’t slept well since Friday.

Then things got interesting.

After the 15 or 20 minute treatment, four members of the nursing staff came into my room as if they had been assigned a task I wasn’t aware of.

As they walked to my bed, they told me I was being moved. My room was being changed because it was a “zero pressure room,” they said, and it was now needed for someone else.

All of that came out in succession, without pause.

A few things to note at this point:

It’s 1:30 in the morning. I’m recovering from walking double pneumonia at 60 years old.

I had been in that room for 10 and a half hours.

Everyone I chose to call and tell about my circumstances has room 324 as where they would find me if they decided to visit today.

At this point I was exhausted and ready to simply go to sleep and rest until maybe 7:00 in the morning.

None of that mattered to whoever the decision maker was who chose to give someone else preference for reasons I still don’t understand. And before any of you fly at me about how understanding, accommodating, and reasonable I should be, let me tell you this.

I don’t give a damn who needed that room in their eyes.

I was in the room, it was my room, and if you didn’t have the facilities to accommodate the person you felt should have it, you should have sent them to another part of the hospital or made other arrangements.

This isn’t rocket science.

I believe that if I had been an 80- or 90-year-old white woman recovering from walking double pneumonia, other arrangements would have been made, absolutely.

As my things were gathered and my bed was prepared for travel, I began the meticulous process of calculating and summarizing exactly what was going on at almost 2:00 in the morning. A double pneumonia patient who had been there all day was being moved from his room so that another person could have it, all while being told the room I was moving to was somehow a better room.

It is not a better room.

It’s a double-occupancy room, and the fact that no one else is in it doesn’t make it better. It just makes it a bigger room because no one else is in it, or there’s no bed for them, not that a hospital bed couldn’t easily be pushed in on the same wheels they roll on throughout the whole hospital every day.

The bathroom was smaller. From what I could see, the ceiling tile was rotting, turning brown, and sagging, as if water was seeping through a leaking roof in that area of the hospital.

Naturally, being the person that I am, the trip from my old room to the new room increased my frustration and anger, and my complete awareness of exactly what was happening to my Black ass at 2:00 in the morning at Abrazo Scottsdale Campus off Bell Road.

And naturally, I had to open my mouth and start addressing it.

I pointed out that it was almost 2:30 in the morning, and asked why I was being moved from the room where my family could find me, why I was taken from a single room to a double room, why I was taken from a better room to a lesser room, and whose decision this was in the first place.

As the questions mounted and the pressure for answers grew, they started defending what they were doing, and it was indefensible.

At this point I told them that if I could wake my wife up right now from her deep REM sleep, I would leave this hospital at 3:00 in the morning without an ounce of regret.

Listen.

I hadn’t been to a doctor for a checkup in probably 15 years, because I don’t like hospitals and I don’t like doctors.

I believe the history of modern medicine in the United States was shaped by bias against Black people. Our ancestors were used as experimental subjects, as in the Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to 1972, and in the gynecological experiments of J. Marion Sims on enslaved women. We have been told for generations that we have a higher pain tolerance, or that we exaggerate our conditions, and studies still show Black patients’ pain being undertreated.

That history is why I distrust the system, and it’s why I don’t go to a doctor on any regular basis.

It would take me being at death’s door, barely completing the journey, to get me to a hospital, only to put my life in the hands of a complete stranger whose social leanings and attitudes are a mystery and could put my life in jeopardy.

Life is not a game, yet I believe some doctors and nurses, in America and elsewhere, will treat a Black life as expendable.

Anyway, through my strong insistence, I demanded to speak to the person who made this decision, and I was presented with a middle-aged Filipino man who was not up to the task of dealing with me in my present state.

I understood instantly that he was not the one who made the final decision to move me from a decent room to a far lesser one just to accommodate another patient, one I still hadn’t seen, even though I asked who it was and whether they looked like me.

That’s right, I said it.

So far, no response, no reveal, nothing.

Instead, I got from this man everything we Negroes have heard when we watch them being them.

He showed me his skin (it was white, so I don’t know what that was about, but okay), using it to convey that he was just like me.

I showed him mine as well, and I said:

“Nothing about you is like me. Not your history. Not your opportunities. Not your experiences. Nothing. And the optics of what you folks have done to me at 2 o’clock in the morning is fucking foul.”

Yeah, I said precisely that.

Either way, here I am in the room, mad as hell, willing and (maybe) able to walk the 3 1/2 miles right back home, if I thought I could get in the house, and if my wife wasn’t in her REM sleep and wouldn’t cuss me out for waking her and scaring the hell out of her at 3 in the morning.

But I figured sometimes it’s probably better to let Lena sleep.

And to those of you who may think I’m being far too petty and far too extra, take that notion and shove it up your ass.

The lack of any detailed explanation for the move tells me it was done to accommodate the person they wanted to give that room to, and I believe that person did not look like me.

A real issue is explained in detail. It’s not vague.

On a side note, one of the nurses who made sure my IVs were connected and running came into my new room and said to me, “I told them this wasn’t going to go over well, because that was your room.”

Well, looky there.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I ask that readers not offer a counterpoint in an attempt to mitigate, marginalize, or minimize the insult to my intelligence that was attempted during this process.

I am under no obligation to let your child sit at the window seat of a commercial aircraft.

I am under no obligation to be understanding about the circumstances Negroes are enduring these days.

I am under no obligation to be cooperative.

To me, what happened was obvious, transparent, historical, and consistent. I came to that conclusion because of how the whole situation was maneuvered with expert precision.

Remember: it’s the little things done to us that always lead to the larger things done to us.

And they truly tried to play in my face.

Or maybe it’s the meds, who knows.

Either way, here is my advice: when you need medical care, go, but bring someone with you, ask questions, and ask for explanations in writing. I don’t trust a system that was not built with our best interests in mind, and that is exactly why we need an advocate in the room.

And in the unlikely event that what I experienced was a coincidence, that nothing I’ve conveyed holds any water, and that it was an innocent mistake or a huge misunderstanding, then the principal points of this unpleasant experience, which most definitely needs a thorough investigation, should still include words like “perception,” “point of view,” and, most of all, “optics.”

There.

Just like I titled it:

Same shit. Different way.

🫩

Footnote: I feel much better.