Patients, doctors, nurses feel abandoned
One August morning this year, my husband awoke and told me he felt lucky. And indeed, the last year was a good year with but a few health emergencies for either of us. But by late afternoon his urine was filled with blood.
In the 61 years Ted and I have been married we struggled through many an unexpected interruption to our expectations. If youth is about the lust and the beauty of love, then old age is about dedication to something bigger than our individual selves. Blame and temper are not sustainable when trouble hits. We can and do pull together and confront what needs confronting.
When Ted got sick this time and I switched into the adversarial mode, I encountered a medical system beleaguered by nearly two years of the fight against COVID.
The urologist was out of town, but his physician assistant saw him after finding no infection in his urine and got us in that day to have a radiology test that located an arterial bleed. That’s when our insurance company rejected the doctor-approved procedure to fix the problem in the least invasive manner possible. I filed an expedited review that was quickly approved. It all took time for the insurance company to send the paperwork to the doctor and to us.
And then on Nov. 9, the heavy flow of blood resumed for more than a week. I could not think. I just kept writing emails to all our doctors and taking Ted
to the independent lab for blood and urine testing. My husband, I thought, could die waiting for the doctors and insurance company to get their paperwork done.
I’m not a rule-bound person and I’m never afraid to ask for help. But sometimes, I forget to ask.
When I finally asked the urologist’s physician assistant to help us get the appointment with the radiologist, she replied that she had no control over another doctor’s schedule. She said this as she was walking out the door, when I said, “We feel abandoned.”
She heard and turned back to us, closing the open door, “We’ve lost five of our nurses and two of them were PAs.” She promised to try and call the radiologist before the end of the day.
And then I realized, we are all feeling abandoned. No blame, no fault, no guilt — it’s just fact.
I called the scheduler a bit later and told her we really needed the appointment ASAP. She replied, “I’m doing my best. It’s not our fault.”
I knew that feeling because I was blaming myself for not trying hard enough or asking for help in a timely manner. And I know this woman sits in a cubicle all day trying to give everyone their chance.
But I did ask, not attack, as is sometimes my desire, and someone talked to someone and by 3 that afternoon we received a call from the scheduler for early December.
We now have an appointment at a leading hospital in the Texas Medical Center. The cardiologist has approved the procedure as have the urologist and primary doctors.
But it took almost four months to discover what was holding us up and even now if the hospitals go through another surge of COVID and beyond we could still end up on another waitlist and need a new approval for the same procedure.
When we went to the independent lab and the technician took possession of my husband’s urine sample I watched as she made a sign of the cross over my husband’s blood-reddened sample.
“Are you blessing my husband’s urine?” I asked.
She turned to me, “You saw that?” “I did, thank you.”
Neither of us said what we were both thinking: He is a dead man walking. It is what Ted says or thinks every day that the heavy blood appears.
This procedure and my persistence are not about saving his life but about comfort, saving him from a Foley catheter that must be emptied and irrigated every day when it clogs.
We both recognize we are already receiving the care and attention from the medical community that we so need as we live through the last years or months or days of our life together. And we are grateful. For each other and all who touch our lives.