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March
2002
If It Weren't
for the Honor …
I'm feeling better every day, thanks.
But I'm still trying to balance the urge to lie
on the couch staring at the ceiling with the desire to resume an
action-packed, fun-filled normal life.
Here is what happened: As the clock struck midnight
on Dec. 31 to welcome a brand new year, my own heart struck back
and put me in the hospital. For weeks afterward, I had turned from
a promoter of science into a specimen of science, the one known
as "patient."
It was a humbling experience, and illuminating.
Modern medicine, especially as practiced at a world-class facility
like Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, is, indeed,
miraculous. Within minutes of arriving short of breath, in pain,
and in heart failure, I was diagnosed with an inflammation that
had run amok, viral pericarditis and then hooked up, injected, drained
and oxygenated.
The only real blip was a bad drug reaction, due
to taking drugs on an empty stomach. That was symptomatic of how
the medical system, once it saves your life, can undermine your
health.
My medications were to be taken at 6 a.m., 2 p.m.
and 10 p.m. Hospital meals are served at 8 a.m., noon and 6 p.m.
You don't have to be a scientist to figure out that if your drugs
are to be taken with meals, something is wrong here. But the prescribing
physician, the hospital pharmacy and the hospital meal service play
by their own rules, and the small effort it would take to coordinate
them was beyond my diminished capacities.
When the hospital cut me loose, doctors assumed
that I would understand inflammatory processes and offered no practical
information about the course of recovery, how to avoid recurrence
or how to regain strength. These questions are not easily answerable
by medical research or even clinical experience -- but it sure would
have helped to have some guidance from those who know my case.
This illness not only weakened my body, but it
also weakened a once-powerful belief -- the belief that the individual
can always act as a rational consumer of health care. As educated
and willing as I was to participate in my own care, I felt thwarted
by a lack of internal resources (feeling so crummy) and external
ones (reliable, relevant self-management information). The experience
taught me a vivid lesson about how far we have to go to better accommodate
illness and recovery as a normal part of life.
But, as they
say, if it weren't for the honor, I'd have just as soon walked.
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