First, Do No Harm

This is our experience of the small-town American health-care system.

Back in October, the night before Halloween to be exact, the SO had an accident. He was carving a pumpkin for the kids at the kitchen table; he had been sitting and stood up to get a better look at a particularly tricky cut. I moved the chair he had been sitting in so I could get around him for a closer view (probably to back-seat pumpkin carve).

Unfortunately, he didn't notice that I had moved the chair and sat down. And he sat down HARD. So far, so funny, you might think. We've all done that at one time or another I'm sure; you just laugh it off, people try not to snicker, you feel slightly embarrassed. End of story.

But that's not what happened.

Later on that evening, he complained of feeling light-headed and went to bed early. When the alarm went off the next morning, I couldn't get him up. He would talk to me but he made no sense, almost like he was talking in his sleep. Over the next two hours, I finally got him to wake up enough to have a conversation and it became clear that he didn't know what day it was, or what had happened the night before; he just kept repeating that he had a terrible headache.

I eventually managed to get him to the local ER, where the doctor had a CAT scan done and diagnosed a serious concussion. Because the SO had suffered from four or five previous concussions, the ER physician mentioned the possibility that he might be suffering from Post Concussion Syndrome and was discharged with advice to follow up with his local doctor in a week.

When I got home, I Googled the side effects of Post Concussion Syndrome and got worried. I got more worried the next day when the SO had trouble waking up again, didn't remember going to the hospital, and still thought it was October 30th. And even MORE worried when the same thing happened again the next morning, and the next. Then he started vomiting....just so you know, this is NOT a good development.

To cut a very long and messy story short, we went to his personal doctor that day after much jockeying for an emergency appointment. The doctor made it clear that he didn't think much of the injury and attempted several lame jokes implying that I had really hit the SO over the head with a frying pan. Oh, the comedy! Not at all side-splitting and just what you want to hear in a time of pain and crisis.

This doctor sat rolling around on his little round wheelie chair, smugly wearing his little bow-tie, and emphatically told me that traumas from head injuries did NOT have a cumulative effect (thereby refuting all known medical consensus) but maybe he could schedule an MRI. It's fair to say that I did not care for this man, his jokes, or his opinion at all by that point.

The MRI results came back two days later and showed .... nothing obviously wrong. We were assured that the SO would be back to normal-ish in a few days and sent home. One week went by, then two, then three. The SO still had significant memory loss and was still in intense pain. One MORE trip to the personal physician (who was "unavailable" so we saw his intern who graduated from a no-doubt scenic medical college in Guatemala. Why would you hang that diploma on your wall? For laughs?) FINALLY got us a referral to a local neurologist.

The local neurologist ordered more tests because he thought there might be spinal damage as well. Sure enough, the results came back positive for a ruptured disc in the neck and a herniated disc in the lower back. He recommended seeing a neurosurgeon a.s.a.p. and scheduled an appointment for us at the end of December. It had been almost 7 weeks since the initial injury but we were grateful that someone took the problem seriously (at last!) and were hopeful that at the very least the physical pain could soon be minimized.

It was not to be.

The neurosurgeon we had been referred to was working out of the local gym here in town. Yes, you heard me right, the local gym, with exercise bikes, sweaty fat people and free-weights everywhere. An AMA board-certified neurosurgeon. His office was a room in the back of the building that contained a card-table and a metal folding chair, and his files were in a cardboard box. He did not physically examine the SO in any way, and basically tried to sell him a gym membership touting the Alexander Technique. Which I'm sure is a fine technique if you don't have herniated and ruptured discs that just might require surgery. The SO hobbled out of there extremely pissed off and still in pain.

Back to square one.

The SO called the original neurologist and informed him he was not happy with this situation. He was assured that a new referral to a different neurosurgeon would made quickly. We waited and heard nothing and then waited some more. That was back at the beginning of January. I finally called last week and managed to get an appointment today with the original neurologist to try and find out what the problem was. Guess what! They screwed up and never made the referral appointment! We had to go there to find out. Surprise!

So now we wait until next week when we have an appointment with a someone whom I really hope can help the SO get better.

If the French can transplant a whole face, is it too much to ask that modern American medicine can fix a disc and give us less hassle?

This system is broken.