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Stones & Bones / health care / volume 11 number 11, November 2009 DOSE OF REALITY One oft-repeated conservative mantra we hear nowadays is the one telling us that the road to health care reform requires each of us to take on more personal responsibility for our own health care. You have to read between the lines to get the intended message here: each of us needs to take care of our own—and nobody else’s—health care needs. In there also is the idea that we should not help raise overall health care costs by running off to the doctor with every little sniffle and ache. I sorta sensed that there was something inherently wrong with these ideas but I still suckered myself into being my own doctor a few weeks back when I got my first ingrown toenail. Actually, I was totally successful, and I cured the problem—no cost, no muss, and only minor pain. So well had I done on the first toenail that infection of the second one gave me no pause at all, and I attacked that problem with confidence and vigor. This, however, was the toenail from hell, a true rogue out of the frozen north. The consequence of my misguided self-treatment of it was an intensive, highly educational, and ungodly expensive interaction with Alaska’s medical establishment. I suddenly found myself unable to walk and with severe pain that improved only slowly as I spent the next two days in the Intensive Care Unit of Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, and then, after being Medivaced to Anchorage, another nine days in the ICU of Providence Hospital. It’s not over yet, either. As of November 7, 2009, I am still wheelchair-bound and hooked up to a machine that will pump chemicals into me for the next month or so. It’s been a highly social affair. I have met a lot of people, almost all for the first time. As best I can recall, my new acquaintances numbered about ten medical doctors, an equal or greater number of registered nurses, and an untold horde of technicians I mainly remember only by the shapes of the various instruments they used to put chemicals into me or suck away what Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper referred to as my “precious bodily fluids” on an almost hourly basis. Among the more memorable medical practitioners were the three Physical Terrorists who strode into my room every afternoon swishing their long blonde ponytails, and with blue eyes gleaming evilly, advanced toward my bed where I curled up defensively as through trying to pretend that I wasn’t really there. Of course it never worked. I’d soon be staggering down the hall atop a walker, being figuratively whipped along by one or more of these tormentors. After you have been lying in a hospital bed for a few days under the influence of some unknown number of medications you tend to get a bit hazy about that is real and what is not. I do remember trying to entertain myself by mentally adding up the probable cost of being where I was, there in the hospital with all those medical personnel in attendance. On the few occasions when I sought help by asking a doctor or a nurse about the cost of some particular procedure I was undergoing, the typical response was a blank stare indicating the opinion that I was either crazy or at least ill-mannered for having broached such a subject. Obviously, cost and care are two words that should never be uttered in the same sentence in medical circles. I finally gave up on the whole thing by satisfying myself with the conclusion that my fortnight away from home probably cost somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. It didn’t matter anyway; I had no choice in any aspect of what was happening to me. No choice? Yes, that’s right; no choice. This horrible thought suddenly dawned on me as I heard some Sarah Palin-type bobblehead on the hospital TV repeatedly bemoan the loss of choice Americans would incur if the government were to get more involved in health care. You poor ignorant sap, I thought to myself, if you were lying here in a hospital bed like me you would learn real quick all about choice. During my two-week sojourn the only choice I made was to go to the local clinic when a nurse I spoke to on the phone suggested that my symptoms dictated attention as quickly as possible. Once there, I did not get to choose what doctors or other medics I would see, nor did I participate in the decisions that would be involved in diagnoses or treatments. Nobody said, “How would you like to be Medivaced to Anchorage right away to receive the care we can’t give you here?” Instead, somebody said, “You are going to be Medivaced to Anchorage right away.” I was not inclined to debate that issue or make any other choice regarding my health care. As far as I was concerned I did not want to make any choices—in part because knew I was not competent to make such choices. I had already proven that by trying to doctor my own ingrown toenail. And obviously that bobblehead on TV decrying the imagined loss of choice was totally clueless about the realities of health care in America. Neil Davis is a retired geophysicist and author of several fiction and nonfiction books. His most recent book is Mired in the Health Care Morass. More on health care issues can be found at his blog, http://healthcaremorass.blogspot.com. Neil can be contacted at neildavs@mosquitonet.com. | ||
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