Reply #11: I wish you happy birthday and I wish my mother had your wife for her doctor tonight...

[demodonkey]

My mother is not dying (I HOPE) but she is suffering horribly tonight in a strange hospital several hundred miles from home.

She has been fighting to bounce back from a stroke, still improving 23 months post-stroke, and she would do a lot better if we didn't have the barbaric "me first" insurance-driven healthcare system in this barbaric country.

Thanks to the greed of a skilled nursing facility where she was trying to get therapy, my mother is tonight in a University Medical Center in the northeast. She had a seizure last week while traveling to get help with her stroke (long story as to how the nursing home caused this) and although there was no new stroke and her mind is fine, she is now in terrible spasms and agonizing pain. Just screaming in agony. I am here demanding CARE for this pain -- pain management which is a specialty this hospital supposedly has -- and CARE that her spasms do not become additional contractures that will leave her bedfast. But her doctor (a resident) gets her confused with another patient, then wants to discuss nothing but pushing her out the door into another nursing home. Social worker (whose job really it is, I know from sad experience, to push 'em through and is not really on the patient's side) isn't really listening to what I am saying either.

Pain like this is a medical NEED, perhaps an emergency, and all they want to do is make the revolving door go faster as they push her out.

Your wife may be the exception, for in my sad experience the majority of our healthcare industry is out for the almighy DOLLAR, not to help anyone. My mother has seen hundreds of nurses, doctors, case managers, CNAs, etc. over the past two years and I can count on my one hand the ones who really care. There are a few out there but so sadly, very few.

So here I am, in a strange hospital and far from home, facing Christmas with NO friends and my dear mother screaming in pain while I fight bureaucacy. And I DO mind this; in fact I am miserable.

O yes, and this will be our first Christmas without my beloved brother, who died last May AT AGE 49 from TWO concurrent infections acquired in another nursing home.