@bkeske, medical issues have a habit of getting twisted around even in
the first person. Sometimes it is the doctors fault. They will
frequently give a very shorthand explanation of what is going on and get
miss understood. I usually do not get the full story until I get the
notes from the hospital. Even then sometimes I remain confused.
Hospital
care has taken a dive since the recruitment of hospitalists. The job of
a hospitalist is to make money for the corporation. In metropolitan
areas primary care physicians got locked out of hospitals.
The way they
did it was in order to get inpatient privileges you had to have at least
20 inpatient cases a year. Very few of us have that many inpatient
cases on a yearly basis. Many primary care physicians are happy with
this as hospitals can be a PITA.You make more money with less work
staying in your office.
The loser is as always the Patient. Medicine has
become industrialized and impersonal. It's job is making money and not
getting sued. Having been personally involved with "the best" hospitals
in Boston on multiple occasions recently. I have had surgery 5 times in
the last 2 years and each one was followed by complications, one a
serious and iatrogenic osteomyelitis of my left clavicle which required 6
weeks of IV antibiotics and a bone graft from my right hip followed by
an ilioinguinal neuropathy and a huge hematoma. I have fully recovered
but am left with two steel plates and sixteen screws in my shoulder.
Yikes! So you have seen up close and personal what I have been talking about for some time now. I was there too last year and saw it myself.
Even after I got out and recovered and had enough energy to go back and try and let them know what happened, my "Patient Advocate" turned out to be a total corporate lackey, they flat out lied about things I know happened and it developed into a situation where I had to either give up or try and push a major federal case. Got a good life ahead of me, not about to devote it to trying to fix our broken health care system!
It is well and truly broken. So broken that when I hear Peter is in hospital my first thought is not gee I hope whatever he has doesn't kill him, it's gee I hope "health care" doesn't kill him! I remember as a little kid the general attitude among people my parents age was oh no the hospital, is where people go to die! Medicine then made tremendous progress, thanks to science, only to swing back to the dark ages, thanks to financialization.
The sooner he can get out of there the better. Godspeed.