College backs medical student who boasted about ‘missing’ a patient’s vein after patient mocked her pronoun pin

A college is taking the side of one of its medical students who boasted about "missing" a patient's vein after the patient reportedly laughed at her pronoun pin, Campus Reform reported on Wednesday.

What are the details?

The Wake Forest School of Medicine is standing by fourth-year medical student Kychelle Del Rosario after she publicly stated that she intentionally "missed" a patient's vein.

In a since-deleted tweet, Del Rosario wrote, "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."

The tweet almost immediately went viral and eventually caught the school's attention.

The university in turn placed Del Rosario on a temporary leave of absence pending an investigation into the incident.

On Wednesday, the school announced that the tweet was incorrect.

"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 university said in a statement on the incident. "The student did not attempt to draw blood again."

The school told Campus Reform that it is "dedicated to providing compassionate care to all" patients.

"When the social media post of one of our students surfaced this week, we immediately started reviewing the incident to determine the facts," the university said in its statement. "Our review revealed that the description of the patient encounter on social media does not reflect what actually occurred. We also determined that all of our procedures were followed while caring for this patient."

Del Rosario herself also clarified what reportedly did take place.

"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 added that she "never intended to harm the patient," and that the tweet made the school look bad.

"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," she said.