Healthcare Frustrations

Healthcare proximity is a real concern for aging city folks contemplating a permanent move to the country. They’re accustomed to a hospital down the street. To pharmacies a block or two from home.

They’re used to deliveries, too, of medicine and food.

I had a lot of experience with these matters at Winedale during the time Hale was ill, even prior to the pandemic.

For one emergency I drove him at night to the ER at Houston’s Methodist Hospital.

Hale’s illnesses wore a life and death costume that invested them with significance.

But there are others that feel more like comedy, colored with pain. That’s the kind I’m enjoying now.

I was buying organic fertilizer, a brand that comes in plastic jars and looks like seeds. I bought three jars, two large, one small. The woman at the cash register placed them in a cardboard tray with handholds.

We were chatting when I began to carry it like a tray of sandwiches toward the door.

I knew after the first five steps that I had made a mistake, but there was no one to hand it off to. By the time help arrived, the damage had been done.

That was on June 4. The effects of the twinge I’d felt began to spread. Everything I did seemed to make it worse—unloading the dishwasher, opening the big cans where I store birdseed, sliding groceries out of the car.

Sleeping, too. Sitting. As days passed and the pain increased I realized that I needed to go to Houston to see my doctor.

Thus began my excursion through modern American medical practice. The experience is frustrating on every side.

I’ve seen toddlers try to do what physicians do every day. That is, fit all these square and angular blocks into round holes. It doesn’t work for twoyear- olds much better than it does for the patients of modern medicine.

And, of course, the term “patient” is well chosen for the hopeful recipient of care. Because the medical machine into which she steps moves “exceeding slow.” Continued from Page D1

“It’s a process,” the nurse practitioner tells me with a straight face. She hasn’t noticed, you see, that it’s this farce written by playwrights we’ve never met and don’t really like. And we’re both playing our roles.

I’ve logged x-rays, consultations, an ER visit, a CT scan, two prescriptions that made me sicker, and a prescription Lidocaine patch that at least stops the pain for as long as I’m allowed to wear it.

What could have been done in three days has taken two weeks in a process of trial and error. And pain still wakes me in the night.

The internist reads the CT scan and sends me to a pain management doctor in the third week.

At last, a chance at actual pain relief. A cortisone shot.

Nope. Not quite yet.

First, one more test--a new, fancy, full body nuclear bone scan that will allow exact placement of the cortisone.

Well, we certainly want that, don’t we? Placed wrong, it would do no good.

But before it can happen, two more weeks will be consumed in scheduling—two weeks minus six days of holidays.

That means I’ll miss my birthday trip to see my grandchildren— a big birthday, this year, as luck would have it. There was to be a celebration.

“Oh, you can celebrate that anytime,” a friend tells me.

And of course, she’s right. How I may feel about it is of no interest to anyone.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com Her new book, This Familiar Heart: An Improbable Love Story, is available at the Fayette County Record office and bookstores everywhere.