The Impatient Patient: An Operating Manual

With a variety of afflictions, lately a painful tumble, I’ve had copious recent experience with America’s health care system. Currently warehoused at Harborview, with one of the Sacklers’ pain killers in me, I have observations about being hospitalized. Consider it an impatient patient’s eye view.

The patient is last to know: I may exit tomorrow, hopefully to the superlative Kline Gallant rehab home. The matter is out of my hands, however, a matter of logistics and negotiation involving the hospital, the home, my insurer, and family. Life decisions are being made about my life but I am curiously detached from same.

Hospitals offer no rest: Get some sleep here, you are told. Yet folks at Virginia Mason visit at 3 am to check blood pressure and blood sugar. A hospital is noisy: Code Red warnings are a feature at Harborview. My memory of hip surgery at Swedish is of bright lights.

Hospital food is deliberately dull: The menu advertises delectable, but what’s delivered is relentlessly bland — with limits and certain dishes verboten. Whatever the order, it comes with broccoli.  Kevin Hamilton is one of the country’s premier election law experts, but to me he’s the guy who smuggled a croissant into Harborview.

Expect gentle love: Louise Fletcher won an Oscar for her role as iron-willed Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest. My experience is far different. I get babied, called “my dear” with apologies for every pain-causing move. It’s both genuine and calculating, a nursing supervisor confided to me. A mollified, gently treated patient is far less likely to cause a fuss.

Cleanliness: Hospital staff pay relentless attention to hygiene, putting on gloves and delegating waste and washing up. The patient is left to fend for himself/herself. You can get pretty dirty in a hospital or care facility, particularly with matted hair. To get cleaned up, you’ve got to speak up.

Hard to “ask your doctor,” the relentless message of drug ads on television. But try to catch or hold down the doc who appears at your bedside — particularly the lordly surgeon. Sure, the folks at VM’s wound clinic are wonderful — they saved this Diabetic’s foot — but lightning visits are the rule.

Nurses are the front line of health care. They work incredibly hard, hold in their heads details about patients’ meds, and comfort the afflicted. Sure, they have a militant union, but this profession needs more people and greater respect.

Patient ignorance is peril:  I’ve come to admit paying insufficient attention to this facet of my life. Close friends have acted otherwise, I think of Peter Jackson’s two year battle with cancer. Brent Walth, the Oregon investigative reporter, researched every step of treatment and alternatives, winning the respect of his doctors. He is very much alive and wrote a Facebook post that should be mandatory reading for everyone diagnosed with a serious illness.

Thank God for Immigrants: A young nursing assistant from Somalia tended to me during an earlier hospitalization. Immigrants do much of the grunt work in American health care. They are not taking “American jobs” but pursuing the American dream. I have found in them a wonderful sweetness along with the patience of Job. We are fortunate to have them.