David's Ehrenstein's new book!
Here's a brief section from my book Early Plastic that demonstrates what can happen if one relies on emergency rooms, as per Mitt Romney's "solution" to the nation's health problems, in lieu of having some form of medical insurance. Only by a fluke (the E.R. mistakenly believing that D had insurance) did David manage to survive a stroke that put him in the hands of ER personnel whose sub rosa instructions were clearly to get such---let's face it---deadbeats off of their hands at all cost. Just make sure they had a pulse when you slid the gurney in the ambulance for the pitstop at "County" on the way to Potter's Field.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
That's Where We Came In
"Chief
Complaint/History of Present Illness:
This 49-year-old,
David Ehrenstein, was presented to the Emergency Room at Midway
Hospital on 12-28-96 complaining of headache and weakness. The
patient's blood pressure in the Emergency Room was 207/126, and a
head CT showed a large intracranial hemorrhage originating just
adjacent to and extending into, and nearly completely filling the
right lateral ventricle. The patient was admitted to the Intensive
Care Unit where. . ."
This thing
that happened to David, my significant other of nearly the last
thirty years [now nearly fifty---2012] wasn't what I had in mind as a dynamite finish to this
book. Two days after Christmas '96, and I had just been laid off from
my job as a film researcher. To postpone telling David the bad news,
I almost stopped on the way home to check out a new video store in
the neighborhood. But I would rather be with David than aimlessly
eyeballing empty video boxes. I got back behind the wheel of my
beloved and beat-up three-decades-old VW and continued home.
Pulling up in front
of the house a few minutes later, something was wrong: David was
supposed to have been home all day working on his book, yet it was
six o'clock and mail still had not been taken in. Without even
grabbing the accumulated post, I ran up the hallway stairs two at a
time. All over the house wet towels lay scattered about. In his
bedroom I found David lying prostrate, nearly unconscious and unable
to respond to my entreaties to tell me what was wrong. He could only
moan: "Leave me alone. I'll be be all right." Bullshit! I
called 911, the paramedics quickly arrived, and after a cursory
examination, David was diagnosed as suffering from nothing more
serious than a "viral infection." Odd! He didn't even have
a fever. They prescribed bed rest, liquids, aspirin, and departed.
An hour later,
David was somewhat more responsive, but I remained unsatisfied with
the diagnosis: how could you have a viral infection but no fever? Our
friend and neighbor Sharon Butler and I were somehow able to get him
down the stairs and into the car. We took him to a nearby emergency
room where he lay the next two hours almost entirely unresponsive in
a chair. At last a doctor summoned us back to an examining room.
Again, the diagnosis was the same as an hour earlier.
"But how can
you have a viral infection without a fever?," I pleaded
with
the physician.
"It happens
sometimes."
"Oh.. .."
As with the
paramedics, aspirin (the worst thing that you could have given him it
turned out) and bed rest were prescribed. We went home where it was a
nightmare. David mostly moaned and cried out for something to kill
the pain. Fortunately, for no particular reason, I gave him Tylenol
instead of aspirin. Instinctively, I applied cold compresses. Later I
learned that the "burning" of ice effects a kind of
deflective and competitive false pain, which helps cancel out the
real pain.
Something had been
not quite right with David for at least a week. He'd chalked it up to
having eaten a "bad burrito" at a Mexican fast food place.
"Does your stomach hurt?," I'd asked.
"No."
"A bad burrito
could only give you food poisoning," I nagged. "Leave me
alone. "
I let the subject
drop.
Sunup found David
no better. And again I shoehorned him into the VW. Because it was
close, we went to the same emergency facility. This time, however,
all it took for a different doctor was a cursory exam before he
hazarded that David clearly did not have a viral infection but was
most likely suffering from something much worse. A half-hour later
after a rush cat scan, the doctor's worst fears were confirmed: David
had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Much later, I learned that he had
been knowingly sent home the night before with diastolic blood
pressure of over 200. That's nearly twice what it should be. Months later, by the
time I found out, it was too late to file a malpractice suit in
doctor-friendly California.
"WHAT DO
YOU MEAN HE DOESN'T HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE?" The hospital's
chief neurosurgeon's voice rang out from across the ER facility
where David and a dozen others lay scattered about on gurneys. He
stomped toward me.
"You've
committed fraud allowing your friend there to be admitted to the
hospital under false pretenses!" he pointed at David and ranted.
"Do you have any idea how much the kind of operation he needs
costs?"
"What
operation?" I wondered to myself.
He stormed off.
Ordinarily my
impulse would have been to shout at the retreating doctor, "If I
had known we weren't wanted here we wouldn't have come in the first
place, we'll take our business elsewhere!" Instead I kept my
cool and didn't give him an opening to toss us out bag and baggage. A
few minutes later David was admitted to the hospital's neuro
intensive care unit. Midway Hospital is one of the most expensive
private hospitals in the city. Early on, I had twice informed
personnel there that David had no health insurance (most free-lance
writers don't!): still he was allowed to continue along the
Hippocratic conveyor belt. And by the time the ER had uncovered the
serious nature of his illness, it was too late for them to legally
dump him the way they'd tried to the night before.
I've always been a
strong believer in E.M Forster's axiom that in the process of dealing
with and embracing the daily "seen," there is little or no
time left for dealing with the "unseen." But I contemplate
those few minutes that I hadn't spent perusing the video store
the night of David's (as we came to call it) "incident." It
could have meant the difference between life and death for him. All
those years David and I spent worrying about the inevitability of
AIDS laying waste to one or the both of us. Instead, he had suffered
a bomb in the brain. That's what killed my father fifty years earlier
before he'd even hit the ground in front of me.
Even though "Profit
Before Patients," is Midway Hospital's motto, after stabilizing
medically uninsured patients, its policy is to ship them off to a
public facility post haste. But it was an especially busy time of
year, what with the traditional Christmas upswing in driveby
shootings in Los Angeles, the city where the future comes to die.
There was not a single bed available in the L.A. County hospital
system. They were stuck with David.
__________________________________________________________
PS: 16 years later, David is still in great shape shape. . .NO THANKS TO THE LAZY AMBULANCE PARAMEDICS, NOR TO THE E.R. DOCTOR [HE WAS ALSO ELIZABETH TAYLOR'S BRAIN SURGEON. [I MEANNNNN, HOW HIP CAN YOU GET?] WHO WANTED TO HAVE ME ARRESTED FOR FRAUD, NOR TO THE E.R. PHYSICIAN WHO SENT DAVID HOME THE FIRST TIME WITH ALARMINGLY HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE.
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