Update on Sunny and Asshole Doctors

Hey all,

Just got back from the hospital. Sunny’s doing well all things considering. She’s being given three separate anti-biotics through a drip, and they said she’ll need the drip anti-biotics for three days followed by a week of oral ones.

In other news, I really felt like punching out her doctor this morning. Bear in mind I’ve been up now for nearly 38 hours, so my mood wasn’t the best to begin with.

I was at the hospital at 6am, and about an hour later her doctor flounced into the room. Yes, I said flounced, because that’s the only way to describe it.

He says “Well, we looked at your CT scan of your kidneys and it was absolutely horrendous. I actually had to call a colleague and look up what your condition is called…”

Obviously, at this point, my heart leapt into my mouth, my stomach ended up around my knees somewhere. I was honestly expecting the next words out of his mouth to be something like “Your kidneys are shutting down and we’ll need to find a donor in the next few days or you’ll die.”

I was so shocked, I almost didn’t pick up the fact that he sounded like a grade-school teacher telling a parent about a particularly difficult child. Seriously, from his tone, he might as well have been saying “George’s history homework was absolutely horrendous, it’s like he put no effort into it at all.”

Instead, he told us that her bladder infection was so severe that it had spread to her kidneys meaning that, essentially, they were full of pus…This meant that if the antibiotics didn’t work well enough (and there was every indication that they were), she’d need minor surgery to ‘drain’ them

Thanks Doc, I know you’re trained to not sugar-coat diagnoses in order to not give false hope… but congrats for making me think my wife was going to die, just so you could emphasize the point that she should have gone to you sooner.

That’s the number one thing I hate about American doctors. They tend to forget that they charge a shit load of money. The lowest rate comprehensive medical insurance Sunny and I could find for the both of us was significantly more per month than we earn.

In other words, we just can’t afford to go to the doctor every time we feel a little ‘under the weather’…because $400 bucks to have someone put a popsicle stick on my tongue, tell me to say ‘ah’, and then tell me to drink lots of fluids and take it easy for a few days doesn’t actually fall into our budget. Sunny went to see the doctor on the fifth day she was ill, and for the first four, her symptoms were headache, nausea, and achiness. You know…flu.

Then he went on to pretty much berate her for not knowing that her diabetes (that she got diagnosed with just over a month ago) made her more prone to infections.

This from the Doctor from the same doctor’s office who left a message on our machine saying “The results from your test came back, you have type 1 diabetes, thank you.” Followed by a 15 minute visit to the doctor’s office where they basically said “Avoid sugar and follow this diet.”

You know, pardon us for not knowing that diabetes makes your bloodstream more bacteria friendly while weakening your white cells.

Did I mention that the asshole doctor said, totally matter-of-factly, ‘We lump diabetics in with people who have HIV or are on Chemo.”

Thanks doc. That information might have come in useful when your doctor’s office diagnosed her five fucking weeks ago!

Shortly after that we had a visit from the world’s most incompetent CNA. The guy came in to check Sunny’s blood pressure. You know, where they put an inflatable band around your arm, press the ‘go’ button on the machine and wait for the reading?

It took him six attempts to get it right. The first three he didn’t put the band in the right place to get a reading, the fourth time the mysteries of Velcro overcame him and the band popped right off Sunny’s arm while it was inflating…and the fifth time he got so engrossed by the episode of ‘Cash Cab’ that was on the TV, he didn’t look at the machine in time to see what the reading was.

I will say that the actual nurses were very knowledgeable, helpful and comforting, but her actual doctor (the one who spent the grand total of 6 minutes with his patient since she was admitted), might as well have been wearing a T-shirt that said “Guess what? I totally don’t give a fuck about what happens to you.”

Anyway, now that I’ve vented, I’ll just reiterate that Sunny is doing just fine. Yesterday she was having crippling back pains that haveeased off considerably today, meaning the antibiotics are probably doing their job.

Anyway, 38 hours is long enough, I’m going to bed.