Be Careful What You Wish For

 From a particularly thought-provoking post over at Zero's blog, this response:

"As I type this my wife has been in a local hospital emergency room waiting for a bed for the past 12 hours. She has Covid and is struggling to breath. She has been treated like a leper an not even offered an food. Her ER Doc walked out and slammed the door after she asked to be given a vitamin C IV. He said he wouldn’t treat her with something not proven and she was free to leave."

My reply, which Cdr. Zero may or may not elect to publish there (his choice. And the graphic aids are just for you, Gentle Readers):

My sympathies on your wife's plight. Really.

Just curious: When you take your car to the mechanic, do you tell him how to fix that, too? Or not? If not, how many years of education did your mechanic get, after his college degree?

Have you ever hired a lawyer? Who handled the legal work? You, or him/her?

Just wondering. Let me know if the penny drops.

FWIW, the time to bulk up on Vitamin C was probably long before coming down with COVID, and shockingly, there aren't too many doctors amenable to letting their patients run their own treatment regimen.

It's got a lot to do with losing their own medical license for letting patients practice the medicine. States are kind of sticky about letting passengers fly the airliner, for similar reasons.

So the bigger question is, why did you go to the emergency room in the first place?

My second is, how much is orange juice selling for at the local market?

My third is, where d'ya suppose she got COVID, and how regularly do folks thereabouts wear masks, and how often does she use ordinary hand sanitizer?

And regarding getting fed, did you see a menu at the ER drive-thru window? Or not?

I ask that last one, because as a rule, if you need food, it's probably not an emergency; and if it's an emergency, you probably don't need food. Unless she's been there at least overnight, and/or her blood sugar is less than 70mg/dL, as a rule. 12 hours is largely meaningless, because if there's no food to offer (which is most days, or in my case, nights) there's no point in making such an offer. But if you're admitted and there all day and overnight, we'll generally put in a breakfast order for a tray the next morning. I've yet to see anyone starve to death my entire career for missing a meal or two, but I suppose it might have happened, somewhere.

If being treated "like a leper" is being put inside a sealed isolation room, that's standard of care for COVID for, oh, about 18 months. We're not really big on hand-holding and wet sloppy kisses with infectious diseases, and speaking personally, a COVID patient (I had two more last night) involves getting gowned and gloved up before I enter the Giant Ziplok Of Isolation, and I'm required to wear an N95 at all times in my department. Some people add a face shield or powered respirator. If any of this is news to you, you haven't been watching any since about February 2020.

If you meant they marooned her on an island for life and poked her overboard with sticks, then you have my sincere apologies for the misunderstanding.

But even then, lepers should expect to be treated better than COVID patients: leprosy, unlike COVID, can be cured.

I'm sincerely sorry your wife is sick enough to need a hospital admission.  Ain't nothing good about this bug, and even mild cases suck. But waiting to drive the bus until you get to that point isn't really a great plan, as you're both finding out about now.

Best wishes on your wife's full recovery and return home to her world, rather than spending time in the hospital. I don't recommend it to anyone unless they have no choice, because most people have no wild idea why it isn't run like a billionaire's ski resort or a fast food drive thru, especially for the last year and a half, and are shocked and dismayed that unlike House or Scrubs, or any number of fantasy treatments, things don't all get resolved in 42 minutes, plus commercial breaks, and it becomes very frustrating and disorienting to not be the bright center around which the universe revolves. Illness annoys people, because it rubs their noses in the fact that everything they thought about being in control of their life was pure fantasy. And that's a jarring shock every time it happens.

And particularly among a burgeoning pandemic, short on staff and long on patients, we don't generally have a lot of time to break it down in detail for everyone, every night.

The short story would be for folks to ponder why, going back centuries, it's called being a "patient". All of us in the health care biz are generally working pretty hard lately, but try as we might, we can't be everywhere at once, and we can't make things happen that simply aren't possible. And if people aren't swarming around you in droves, cheer up: it means you're not the guy whose heart has stopped, while we try and bring you back from the dead. So if that's not you or yours, it's a pretty good sign that things aren't really so bad.

And I'm telling you this because you're a good enough guy to be concerned about your wife. (You'd be shocked how many people aren't even that decent.) But what you don't know, not being around nor familiar with the strange new world she's visiting, involuntarily, is that usually the best way to help us do our job, is to let us do our job. Even when and if it makes you feel impotent and out of control.

And if you don't trust us to do that, you probably should leave, and go find someplace where you do trust the people there to do that. As a rule, it doesn't hurt our feelings, especially if you figure that out before you ever walk in. We only get ticked when we waste 5 or 10 hours on someone, who then bails out anyways, wasting the time we could have spent on someone who wanted to be there enough to stay.

_____

I frequently make mention, in my workplace travels, of a salutary tidbit of medical history, from James Burke's excellent The Day The Universe Changed concerning a seminal point about the era when medicine departed from witchdoctory, and became science.

One of the brilliant improvements in the life of the average Frenchman under Napoleon (and there were many such) was that after deposing the king and nobility, there was suddenly a lot of wealth to spend on the peasantry. Consequently, Napoleon set up dozens of free hospitals throughout Paris. And for a real change, they each specialized in one thing. IOW, one hospital treated just gun shot wounds (Napoleon's conquests provided a lot of those too); another might only do broken legs; yet another might do nothing but treat eye injuries, or skin infections, or sick babies.

As Burke points out, medicine before this time was myth and hokum, and if any physician found something that worked, he kept it to himself, lest the other quacks find his secrets out, and steal his best-paying customers.

Under Napoleon's hospital system just the opposite. In the Gunshot Wound Hospital, for example, they might treat 20 gunshot wounds to the legs of as many patients. Five would be treated with boiling tar applied to the wound. Five others might receive a poultice of dog crap and urine daily. Five more would be wrapped, and left to heal or putrefy on their own device. The last five would have the wounds washed daily, and the dressings changed with fresh clean ones. Unsurprisingly, all of the first 15 would get gangrene, and lose their legs to amputation, and the last five - or perhaps only 4 out of 5 - would heal nicely and make a full recovery. But now, the doctors would discuss and publish the results, and tell all their fellow doctors, and the next 20 gunshot wounds would all get the treatment that worked, and the others would be discarded forever. Withcdoctory meets statistics, and transmogrifies into actual science. Voila!

There were only two inviolate rules under this system:

*Everything was free to the patient.

*Anyone who didn't comply absolutely with the doctor's treatment regimen had his sleeping pallet lifted up, carried outside, deposited at the curbside, and given the benediction "God be with you monsieur!" Because the uppity presumption that you, Peasant Scum, knew more about medicine than Le Doctor, brilliant graduate of the medical university, quite reasonably and rationally meant that your ass got kicked the fuck out, with a smile and significant alacrity. You got exactly what you wanted: to run your own case. "Bonne chance, Mssr. Cerveau!"

Fuck off, Bumpkin. We're doing science. And you're fucking up the data.

It's a custom begging to be re-introduced, with a vengeance.

And it's also why people in any science, who lie, or fake data, are the cardinal sinners in the whole edifice, because they're not just screwing the pooch for you, they're dynamiting the entire foundation the whole machine runs on: honest data. Truth.

It's why liars get harsh penalties in courts, and why bearing false witness got its very own Commandment.

You're not just being selfish, or evil, you're crossing the streams. 

And fucking it up for EVERYONE.

Which is why people doing that, for Globull Warmist religious reasons, or COVID Is A Hoax, or the Not-A-Vaxxes Are Safe and Effective, or anything else, should be staked out in the sun all week, then beaten on the back with a dry swim fin, then skinned alive, and lowered an inch at a time into a vat of rubbing alcohol. For openers.

And why people trying to run their own case should be turned loose to do so. At the curb.