We went back down the mountain and drove to a nearby tow-truck garage, where I got a lift in the back of a pickup to a nearby hospital. The doctor performed emergency abdominal surgery to fix an aneurysm, just in time to save my life. I am so very grateful for this amazing medical team who were on the scene and saved my life. Even with advanced warning of my condition, I would have had to make the decision on my own to either get the surgery or let myself die. It was only a few months ago that I saw some people online who felt that it was their right as a Christian to refuse blood transfusions to gay people, as though God would only save straight people. Now this same Christian group believes the opposite and doesn’t even feel that it was wrong to refuse to help someone who is gay. I really wonder about them. When I told one of my students in Sunday school today that I had gotten life-threatening medical surgery, he asked me about my health status. I said that I was very healthy and that I felt great! When I told him that I had an aneurysm, he said that he had heard about people with life-threatening illnesses who went to the hospital and their doctor was a “godly Christian”. It’s amazing how people talk about others. ~~~ sampo _> “When I told one of my students in Sunday school today that I had gotten life-threatening medical surgery, he asked me about my health status. I said that I was very healthy and that I felt great!”_ Thats quite remarkable! A student who asks if you are well, and then you tell him you have a potentially life-threatening illness. And he can still ask, "I hope your feeling better now"? ~~~ brianwawok They are very young, and if you do not tell them your full health status, often they will start to imagine every horrible situation they can. This is a very natural process, if you are young and your environment has never trained you to question things :) ------ wjnc It's a bit weird to have this on the front page without mentioning the political connotations of the whole thing. There's an article in every media outlet that you can read about it. [0] [1] [2] While I have not experienced such problems myself, as far as I can tell this move was in relation to a possible bill in the Dutch parliament that would make same-sex marriage officially illegal (which would basically put all rights of same-sex couples in precarious situations as far as I understand from reactions). So the people involved are of course trying to protect themselves. That's kind of sad in a way, but understandable when a nation votes so much against the direction. [0] [http://www.politico.eu/article/no-dont-have-gay-couples- give...](http://www.politico.eu/article/no-dont-have-gay-couples-give- yourself-surgery-if-youre-afraid/) [1] [https://www.dw.com/en/dutch-court-rules-ministers-can- refuse...](https://www.dw.com/en/dutch-court-rules-ministers-can-refuse-gay- couples-surgery/a-40351047) [2] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/25/dutch- minister...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/25/dutch-ministers- refuse-gay-couples-surgery-gay-sex-marriage) ~~~ cafard [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ministers-in- net...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ministers-in-netherlands- refuse-gay-couples-surgery-they-dont-want-to-treat-sinners/2018/11/15/79a95a7e- 4dfa-11e8-9d5b-8e98d5b9b5ff_story.html) ~~~ wjnc Thanks for correcting me on the names. But the point still stands that those with a lot of media coverage can be well aware of the decision they are taking when deciding whether to ask for help. Not taking anything away from the well reported incident on the thread, but this is a thing we should watch out for. ~~~ cafard I'm a little bit amazed at all the controversy over this. I got a call on the night of Christmas Eve a few years back asking if I could come down to the hospital to pick up a body, having come from out of town. I went in and found one guy waiting on a bed, while another was in the hallway with a couple of doctors. I thought this was some kind of a joke, but I learned I was standing near a patient who had just died. I got very lucky that I knew one of the doctors who was able to identify him for me and get permission to go back to the house to pick up some clothes and make arrangements for the funeral. He certainly would not have been sent home or to the hospital to die in some other place. ------ neonate [http://archive.is/H0wU7](http://archive.is/H0wU7) ------ djohnston Removing personal information is against my opinion on hacker news. ~~~ dang Personal information is the point of the story. If we edited it out of every such story on HN we'd have to edit the title to a generic form. "Piecemeal edition of a Dutch medical report about the first two gay patients in the world to be refused surgery, and how they got a second opinion from the world's leading expert" would be a better title. We can't predict every possible story that might be posted, but we try to keep an eye out for stories like this. We don't like them, either, but we believe it's important to show a bit of tolerance for each other in the tech sphere. ~~~ djohnston I don't think you need to be as specific about the fact that it is personal information. If people don't want to read the personal information it's their decision to click away. When a person wants to find out who is making their day worse, a news outlet is the ideal format to discover that information without the burden of going to each source's home page and searching for it. As a result, I'm unable to read the piece and don't intend to do so without explicit warning as to why that is. ------ b_tterc_p In related news: apparently some in the Netherlands don’t have full faith in their own doctors as a source of medical advice. ------ brianwawok Wow. So you can find out if the doctor is homophobic or not by asking him to resist his beliefs. I am not sure if I want to live in a country like that. ~~~ smnrchrds There is something deeply unsettling about this whole story. It is impossible to say for sure, but it seems that discrimination against LGBTQ people happens mostly because people choose to believe lies and dehumanize others. ------ sewercake That’s really really sick ~~~ c22 Yep. But they are doing what the christians in the US do to LGBT people, which is to force their views on others by denying them help in emergencies, while calling them bigots for objecting to it. In fact the only thing this group is actually doing that is different is being blatantly more honest about their bigotry. I don't mean to dismiss the harm this is causing to real people, but when we are talking about harm to individuals its also important to consider the harm to society that the actions of the bigots bring. ~~~ sewercake It