Well, guess what happened on the way to the holidays.
I mean, there I was heading into Thanksgiving with what I considered to be some health issues that it didn’t seem likely would be addressed until after the end of the year.
I knew something was wrong. My balance was off. I could feel a weakness that seemed to be spreading through my body. I was growing weaker. Walks with my dog became shorter and more difficult to do.
Some of it I had assigned to reaching my 80th year on the planet, but I felt a more rapid deterioration than seemed attributable just to age. When I had tried to draw attention to my concerns with physicians, my concerns were dismissed because all my vital signs were good — even better than most guys my age.
By the way, this isn’t a bad thing, and I’m grateful that in most aspects I’m in better condition than my condition would suggest.
But, frankly my complaints were either perfunctorily observed and then ignored or I was sent off — and it happened several times — to physical therapy for remediation.
I reached out to a hearing and balance practice to see if my balance issues had something to do with inner-ear issues. After some tests, the answer was negative and the recommendation was more physical therapy.
I even asked my physical therapist once if doctors ever listen to them and their feedback. The answer was a flat no.
Instinctively, I knew nothing was really going to happen until I could get an MRI of my upper spine and head and then the attention of a spine specialist. But you can’t order those tests yourself.
So one day moved to another, one week to another, one month to another, with a steady downhill trajectory.
Finally, a member of my primary health practice met with me and agreed to place the MRI order. You know what happens when you are not in the hospital and there is an order placed for an MRI? You may wait 45 days to four months.
Mine was scheduled two months out — a rush job. But it felt to me like an eternity.
Meanwhile, I’m telling anyone who will listen exactly where I think the problem is — right at the base of my skull. It isn’t my first rodeo with cervical spine issues. I had had surgery in 1995 with a fusion at C4-C6. I had the old familiar feeling that I had had back then.
Here’s where the apparent life-saving benefit of diarrhea comes in.
On a Saturday evening the weekend before Thanksgiving, I am suddenly struck with a stomach bug that keeps me busier in the bathroom over the next 72 hours than a banjo player try to end a run.
By Tuesday, my primary doctor sends me off to the hospital emergency room where I’m given two IV bags of saline. They decide that isn’t enough to send me home, so I’m admitted with dehydration from the diarrhea.
Here’s where the magic begins, and where I begin learning something about the medical procedures, practices and protocols in the richest country on earth with the world’s best-educated and trained doctors and the planet’s best diagnostic equipment all of which can come together to perform life-saving miracles.
But may not.
After a night in the hospital, I’m visited by one of the staff physicians who asks how I’m doing…and I tell him. I don’t pass up the invitation. I tell him about the steady decline I’ve been experiencing for several months and my inability to get anyone to listen.
He listens.
And he sends a staff neurologist to visit with me. The neurologist hears me out, and — wait for it — schedules me for an MRI.
Schedules me for an MRI!
The MRI I’ve been asking for for months. And because I’m in the hospital where getting one is infinitely easier, I’m getting one.
My wife and I are in tears.
It’s Thanksgiving day by now, so it takes a few days. And here’s where the next lesson in America’s random health care absurdity presents itself.
We wait through the weekend with promises that tomorrow and then tomorrow again will likely be the day I get my MRI. On Wednesday after Thanksgiving, I’m visited by a different staff physician who informs us that since I haven’t been able to get the MRI yet, and I don’t appear to be ill (did you even read the chart?), the hospital will likely discharge me and I will loose my chance for getting the test there, which means at least another month and a half wait.
I stare at him for a moment and then say, “You just want my bed.”
And he stammers back, “Well, I think the hospital administrators are going to start putting some pressure on us to free up this room.”
I’m thinking that I need to be bleeding. I need to stand up and fall down. I need to show radical signs of distress.
Instead, I say: “Like hell I’m leaving. Not until I get my MRI. Just try and discharge me and see what happens.”
The next day, I get the MRI. Dr. Compassionate returns to say there appears to be some arthritis present but it looks like I can be sent home that same day with instructions for more physical therapy.
Then the spine doctor steps in and says this guy isn’t going anywhere. He has severe stenosis of the cervical discs into the upper thoracic area. There is enough matter pressing against the nerves at the base of the skull to render this patient (me) quadriplegic within perhaps weeks if left unaddressed.
Surgery is the only viable alternative.
Dr. Compassionate withdraws into whatever bureaucratic burrow he keeps handy for these moments.
I undergo a day of cardiac tests to make sure my heart is strong enough for the rigors of spinal surgery. The ticker passes with flying colors. Thanks Dad.
The next morning, the man who I now believe can also walk on water performs an astounding procedure that cleans out the stenosis; removes some bone matter, including a bone spur that was pressing against my esophagus and had changed the sound of my voice; installed two titanium rods along my spine, and held them in place with screws that will eventually be better secured with additional bone growth.
For the next three months, I will wear a neck collar that will not allow movement in any direction beyond a few degrees while that new bone growth is taking place.
In six months, I will be well on my way to whatever new normality awaits me. And in a year, at the age of 82, I will be back to the strapping old fellow my wife says she still admires and loves.
There is an incredible spine surgeon and his team that will still be preforming miracles and giving a new chance at live to people facing worst-case scenarios. Thank the Lord for him and them.
The rest of American Modern Medicine will continue to disassociate, will continue to prescribe medications they say will cure what ails us until they don’t, and will continue to leave patients largely in the dark about what may really be happening.
And Dr. Compassionate will still be practicing administrative medicine in a system that if you as a patient or just a human in need do not learn how to raise your voice, stand in the middle of street naked and scream:
“Pay attention here because I know what you will not take the time to find out. Something is wrong with me and needs attention.”
As a kid on the Old Hyde Place when a cow would show up at the barn for no particular reason and begin bawling in distress, farmers paid attention.
The cow knew.
American Modern Medicine could learn something from the bawling cow if it would just take the time to listen.
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