Just one in a million but you put them all together and you have a health care system severely broken.
My wife is sitting on the couch in our living room. She has what's known as a pic line in her arm. That's a small plastic tube that goes into her blood vein and once a day someone brings her an antibiotic that she will have to learn to administer to herself. in order to save money, through an IV.
She was released this past Saturday after a 10 day stay at the hospital and she will have to spend approx 2 hours a day for the next month hooked up to this IV in order to get well or at least get things stabilized so they know how to treat her.
The horror story started back on June 21st. That's when I took my wife to the hospital that I work at, it is a different hospital than the one she was recently released from and the reason why gives me cause to doubt my place of employment.
My wife had been feeling listless and tired for some time but over the weekend of June 19-21 she developed a sever back pain that, by Sunday, was severe enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. My wife lay there in pain for 8 hours, on a doctors exam table, in the emergency room till they were able to get her a room. She missed the meals they send to the rooms and outside of a sandwich she had in the ER, she'd had nothing to eat all day. She found the next morning that she wasn't getting anything to eat because they wanted to do some test in the morning. She sat there till 5 o'clock pm before she got anything to eat.
They kept her there till the 25th of June then sent her home, still in pain. They gave her a prescription for some antibiotics (5 pills, cost $40.00)some pain pills and no restrictions, go back to work, see you in about 30 days.
She went back to work, at least she tried. She worked the first day then came home early the second day. She's off on Wednesday so she rested up and went back in Thursday. She made it through Thursday and Friday was the holiday so she could rest again. She was in pain off and on through the whole holiday weekend and then she went back to work on Monday. Tuesday she went in and came home early. Wednesday we took her to her regular doctor and he put her in the other hospital.
The reason I make note of "the other hospital" is that my wife couldn't go back to the hospital I work at, not that I wanted her to after the treatment she received there but it wouldn't matter if I wanted to or not because the hospital I work at doesn't take her insurance as of July 1st. Her insurance provider and my hospital couldn't come to terms on something so they parted ways. That leaves many questions unanswered.
My hospital, the one who no longer takes my wife's insurance, did the same tests as the other hospital but my hospital conveniently discharged my wife before her insurance wasn't any good. Four days and they sent her home to go back to work only to work less that a week and be back in the hospital for the same thing. This time she spent 10 days in the hospital. She's in far more pain and having to have daily IVs in order to help her get better. She was diagnosed with several issues involving her kidneys and an abscess on the muscle around her kidney. Now we wait for the bills to come in.
This wouldn't happen if we had single payer health care coverage.