State of Healthcare since COVID
Over the last few months I have been in and out of the hospital a lot. So, I’m going to be explaining why I wanted to talk about this…
Ambulances
Each hospitalization starts with a trip to the ER via ambulance. Why an ambulance? Well, by the time I admit I need help, I’m not able to drive myself. It’s usually because of the amount of pain I’m in. While sometimes the ambulance ride ends up a positive experience (the best you can have in that situation)… Sometimes has been lackluster, at best. Seems like the care factor has been on a steady decline since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Most of the times, I have been delivered to the waiting room instead of actually being cared for. During the ride, they refuse to give any assistance, and the reason I have gotten is that they don’t want to make it worse. I usually ask for pain medication and/or something for the nausea. While I understand the pain medication can make a intestinal blockage worse, and I would completely understand if that’s what I have been experiencing. With the # of times I have been through this, I’m pretty sure I know what to do/expect. Trust would go along way with the patients and the paramedics.
Hospitals
Once arriving at the hospital, if I’m able to get into the ER in a timely manner…. The nurses and doctors do the best they can, but with what they see on he CT scans, they think it’s a blockage. I’ll talk about this in a minute. For the # of nurses that they have on hand, there isn’t enough to care for the patients adequately. I heard the ER nurses state that she had 5-6 patients on average. Then on the floors, they are in the ball park of 7-8 patients. Now, this might not seem like a lot, but if you take into consideration that if a 2-3 patients need extra care, the others go uncared for. From what I have seen, it’s VERY rare that other nurses step into help them out. Which is understandable, to a degree. While the nurses do not have the experience with the patients, they can quickly get up to speed to a limited degree. Is this possibly dangerous? Yes, it is to a degree, but if they are following medication orders or something of that nature, it should be relatively safe to administer.
Doctors
While I’m in the ER, I am normally assigned a doctor or two, and it’s pretty amazing how quick they make conclusions. In the last 2 times I was in the hospital; they were VERY insistent on me having surgery. Both times, it’s not to fix a problem, but to go have a look at the problem. From my experience, exploratory doesn’t really help anything, but to allow for the doctors to see what potentially is a problem. I have had this before, and they said it was going to be a small incision. I woke up with a ~6 inch scar which now looks like a question mark around my belly button. Not to mention the damage they did to my bladder. Let me tell you, avoid vertical surgeries on your stomach at all costs, they hurt like hell and are hard to recover from. What is even better about the doctors, when they finally see that I’m not going to allow for surgery, they drop me like a hot potato. This has happened on two occasions, and they were from different lines of doctors and different specialties.
Second Opinions
Through my work, I was able to get a second opinion which might potentially lead to something life altering for myself. This second opinion was with a doctor in Alabama at a university that specializes in Gastro Intestinal Issues. I was finally able to get my GI doctor to look at the opinion, and he took it to heart and tested some of the items. This resulted in finding that my Thyroid is under active, and I also have a VERY low B12 #. Since that test, I have been doing B12 sublingually and started a Thyroid medication. Through researching these two problems, they BOTH can cause a multitude of problems with my mental health and gastro intestinal system.
I know I have said multiple times that I want to block more regularly… Hopefully that will start happening. It’s hard for me to sit down, and talk about these problems when I feel half-way decent. These times have been rough for me, and this is a form of therapy. I also hope this helps someone else.
