Friday, December 14, 2007

Our health care system is ill...

Medicine is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s a great thing – and also a scary thing. Mistakes are being made and sometimes they are not even being caught.
Cases in point –
A girl friend of mine was hospitalized last week for a suspected cardiac problem. The first evening, her doctor [not her regular family physician] ordered a blood sugar level. They came to draw it while she was having dinner. A few hours later, the doctor came by and told her she was diabetic because her blood sugar was elevated. No kidding, Sherlock! She tried to get him to understand that she was not diabetic, had never been diagnosed as a diabetic, and had no symptoms of diabetes [she’s also a nurse]. He wouldn’t listen to her.
The next day, when he was discharging her, this same doctor wrote her a prescription for Glucophage, blood sugar lowering medication. My friend threw the prescription away. But what if she hadn’t? What if she had taken it and her blood sugar plummeted? She lives alone. Her Rottweiler doesn’t know how to dial 911.
Another case –
Another friend was hospitalized last week for day surgery. She is allergic to Codeine. It was listed on her chart. What did they send her home with as a pain killer? Percocet! It contains a drug similar to Codeine. Did she take it? Yes. Did she know the potential problem? No. Did she have a reaction? Yes, and had to be rushed back to the ER with a drug reaction.
The morale of this story – question everything. Don’t be afraid to be labelled a pain. It’s your life or that of your loved one. Get a second opinion. Look things up yourself. There are great resources on the Web now. Don’t take any medication that you don’t know the ingredients of. Yes, health care is becoming better but it's also getting less and less personal. You have to be an advocate for yourself and those you love.

Friday, December 7, 2007

"The Savages"

I came across an ad for a new movie that was just released called The Savages. It isn't playing locally heremin Phoenix and I'm sorry to see that. With only a limited engagement it's not going to reach a wide audience and it seems like a film that needs to be seen. It's about two adult children facing their father's poor health and having to place him in a nursing home.
This is something that my generation is going to be facing over and over and over again.
In fact, I'm giving a talk about this next month. My current book Second Chance [www.secondchancenovel.com] has this topic as its subplot and my new book [still under construction] is partly about that, too.
Calling us the sandwich generation is trite because the phrase has been used so much but it's true. We're being squeezed from both sides and it's tough.
We have no point of reference. We've never encountered these issues before. And, let's face it, seeing our parents grow old and feeble makes us face something we have never, ever wanted to acknowledge before - we are getting older.