White Coat Ways: A History of Medical Traditions and Their Battle With Progress by Brian Elliott

Author:Brian Elliott [Elliott, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Med Media Publishing
Published: 2023-01-26T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

HOSPITALS

“A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.”

–Groucho Marx

“If your access to health care involved your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that’s not going to promote healthiness.”

–Larry Page

Cindy was struggling to get by. A four-year-old son and six-year-old daughter made hectic the norm for her. She was trying to juggle a job, her kids, and some semblance of her reading hobby all at once. Then, she was forced to drop it all in a fight for her life.

I met Cindy in the emergency department of our main hospital. The 500,000-square-foot hospital towers about fifteen stories up to its rooftop helipad. The campus serves as a temporary home to over one thousand sick patients with a bustling community of nurses, doctors, techs, respiratory therapists, administrators, and others who make health care delivery possible. They interact amid a complicated healthcare system dependent on millions, if not billions, of dollars in physical, logistical, and digital equity. It was this complicated healthcare system that would eventually fail Cindy.

Cindy presented to the hospital with two to three weeks of 102°F fevers and fierce chills that made her whole body shake. Her sheets were drenched when she woke up, and the typical fatigue she had previously felt as a working mom had multiplied by a thousand. Cindy’s sister, who cared for her little ones from time to time, had noticed that she had also been acting strange; she was more forgetful and less interactive.

After I admitted Cindy to the hospital, the diagnostic testing was clear; she had an abscess in her brain. Bacteria had managed to cross the barrier between her bloodstream and her brain, settling in and thriving there while simultaneously wreaking havoc. The treatment was simple: neurosurgery to clean out the infection and antibiotics to help kill the bacteria. Or at least, it was simple in concept.

Within twenty-four hours of Cindy’s admission to the hospital, she was on the operating table. The neurosurgical team drained the abscess and did their best to wash out any infection that they found. Infectious disease consultants had optimized her antibiotic therapy to target the common organisms that lead to brain abscesses. The exact cause of her infection was still unclear, but unfortunately, this is not uncommon for diseases like hers. Three days after Cindy’s initial presentation, she had improved and was recovering well from the operation. But she still wasn’t out of the woods.

Despite her life-threatening illness and recent brain surgery, Cindy wanted to go home. The uncomfortable beds, bland trays of cold food, and isolation from loved ones certainly don’t make hospitals a welcoming place, but beyond that, Cindy had responsibilities. Her two young children were with her sister who couldn’t continue to take time off from her job. Cindy also had her own job to worry about, with bills to pay at home. As long as she stayed in the hospital, her medical bills increasingly compounded that issue. Her hospital expenses were approaching the hundreds of thousands of dollars after just a few days.

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