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Med student who boasted she missed vein of patient who mocked her pronoun pin finally placed on leave

April 18, 2022 | | Print Article

A fourth-year medical student at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University has finally been put on leave after bragging on Twitter in March that she had intentionally missed the vein of a patient from whom she was drawing blood “so he had to be stuck twice” because he made fun of her pronoun pin.

In a statement to Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” producer Greg Re, the school claimed it had reviewed the evidence and determined Kychelle Del Rosario had made an “inaccurate statement” when she virtue signaled to a fellow pronoun-declaring medical professional and described how she’d punished a patient for laughing at her “She/Her” badge.

“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?'” Del Rosario tweeted. “I missed his vein so he had to get stuck twice.”

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1508919774046134274?s=20&t=3LuzP_CC51M5Tci3RQtGIA

 

After much back and forth with Re, the medical school responded on Friday.

“Wake Forest School of Medicine has completed a thorough review of the patient encounter with our medical student who recently made an inaccurate statement on social media,” the school stated. “The review determined that the student had no intention to harm the patient and followed Medical Center protocols. The School and the student have agreed upon her taking an extended leave. During this time the student will not participate in any patient care activities.”


Wake Forest offered no further details of their review — namely, how they determined Del Rosario misspoke, what if any contact was initiated with the alleged victim of the double jab, or how long Del Rosario would be on “extended leave.”

As for Del Rosario, according to the wildly popular Libs of TikTok account, which, along with Greg Re, chronicled the saga on Twitter, she has since deleted her account.

On March 31, Re called the incident “a systemic issue” after another Wake Forest med student tweeted that, while “the missed stick was COMPLETELY an accident” it was nevertheless “karma-tic.”

“This is clearly a systemic issue,” Re tweeted at the time. “Another Wake Forest medical student with she/her pronouns, Ewen Liu, agreed that the patient’s injury was ‘karma-tic.'”

“In other words,” Re said, “if you don’t use their pronouns, they will celebrate your injuries at Wake Forest Medical School.”


In an April 3rd update on the situation, Re posted an email from the school’s deans in which they acknowledged their silence on the matter has been “troubling” and expressed sympathy for students who may been on the receiving end of “phone calls that have been discouraging, disparaging and unkind.”

“They condemn not the stabbing, but ‘unkind’ words from critics,” Re stated.


After repeatedly asking the school to elaborate on their April 15 statement, Re tweeted, “At this time, the D.A. in Winston-Salem has clear legal basis to issue a subpoena to @wakeforestmed to obtain the identity of the patient who was stabbed and to conduct an independent investigation,” adding that “Wake Forest has refused to tell us if they’ve contacted the patient.”


“Basic standards of competence and professionalism in the @wakeforestmed handbook make it clear that bragging about patient injuries is reprehensible,” Re wrote. “Wake Forest is refusing to punish its student for doing so. A voluntary leave amounts to no punishment.”


As the Daily Mail reports, Wake Forest maintains that Del Rosario simply missed hitting the patient’s vein and, as per procedure, she called in a more experienced professional to complete the blood draw.

“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 school stated earlier in April. “The student did not attempt to draw blood again.”

Del Rosario, meanwhile, is reportedly remorseful.

“I am writing this as an apology for a very irresponsible tweet that I sent on Twitter that I highly regret,” the med student said in a statement.

“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,” she explained. “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,” she continued. “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.”

Melissa Fine
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