So, my mom went into the hospital a couple weeks ago. She had been experiencing chest pains and dizziness for several days, with increasing severity and frequency, to the point where the doctor wanted her to go to the ER on a Monday, and she refused to go on the grounds that there was no one to take care of my dad. Of course, none of the rest of us in the family knew that.
By Friday, she wound up in the ER anyway. Fortunately, my cousin volunteered to take over caretaking for my dad for a couple days, even though she was putting on her biggest fundraising event of the year that weekend (she works for the National Kidney Foundation in StL). But after a couple days of dealing with giving him shots, cleaning up after him, feeding him, etc., plus not getting any sleep since he wakes up every hour during the night and has a non-trivial risk of falling, which requires a 9-1-1 call since he's too heavy for either my mom or my cousin to pick up (he can't help since half is body is basically non-functional), she called my sister for help.
So, my sister, 7 months pregnant, flew up to Stl Sunday morning to take care of my dad for a few days. I was scheduled to head to NYC on Wed night, but I changed the ticket to go to StL instead, and flew in to relieve my sister. Fortunately, by that time my mom had been released from the hospital.
Now, here's how it went down with the hospital: they admitted her on Thursday, did a first round of tests, determined that her ventricles were not working in sync with each other due to some issue with the nerves in her heart or something, and then decided that they needed to run a second round of tests, including an echocardiogram and a cardiac catheter, in order to determine the cause of the nerve issue. Trouble is, by the time they'd worked that out as the best course of action, it was late Friday, and they couldn't get on the Friday schedule, and the people who run those tests "don't work weekends".
Nice.
Apparently, the doctors felt my mom was at enough risk of something bad happening that they definitely wanted to keep her in the hospital over the weekend, but not at enough risk that it was urgent to get someone to FUCKING COME TO WORK and run the tests. The insurance won't pay someone overtime or whatever to come in unless there's an imminent risk of something life-threatening happening.
I looooooove healthcare in this country.
So my mom sat in the hospital twiddling her thumbs over the weekend while my cousin and sister took care of my dad, and then on Monday people came back to work and they ran their tests. They expected that they would find arterial blockages, which are apparently the typical cause of issues like the one my mom has, but both tests came up empty. At which point, the doctors admitted that "we don't really know why her heart is doing that", and decided that the best thing to do would be to send her home with medicine for her blood pressure, which was high, and have her start seeing a cardiologist on a regular basis.
Of course, they ended up having to keep her one extra day because she started bleeding from the site of her cardiac cath, but hey, she didn't contract a staph infection while in the hospital so I guess we should all just be glad it wasn't worse.
So, with all this fancy technology, all they were able to do was rule out arterial blockage as a cause. Granted, that's good to know, and is decisively good news. Still, to have been in the hospital for 6 days and have only that and a $10 trillion dollar bill to show for it, I question how much medicine has really advanced since the 1800's.
I mean, would the results have really been that different if they had just slapped some leeches on her and given her some heroin? I'm not so sure...
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