next in a series
Spent some time last night with the folks at the University of Chicago- actually, with a group of postoperative patients who have already had the procedure. It was, as I suspected it woud be, almost utterly useless to me. A lot of talk about recipes and how to avoid temptation. I had questions about the actual surgery etc. but this was apparently not the place I was going to get answers- it was like attending an AA meeting. I might have gotten more out of this if there had been people who were a little closer to their postop, but most of these people were years out.
I want to know things like, what’s it like to deal with the VC filter? How soon does it have to be removed? What do they do to prepare you for self-injection? How long does it take to heal completely? All these questions, and more, I still have. And I assume eventually I’ll get them answered, I guess I just don’t have a fiddlers chance until they know my insurance will cover, at which time I guess I’ll be worth talking to.
Yet another damned reason I distrust the medical profession as a whole. yeah, I understand they have an ROI to think about, but damn.
Og;
Don’t bet that they’ll answer your questions — or even acknowledge that you might have them or that it’s proper that you have them. They have their agenda, a set of boxes, and they want you to fit into them and they don’t care how they bend, fold, spindle, and otherwise mutilate you to make you FIT the boxes.
M
Mark, you know that, Og knows that, I know that. But the meditards continue to think everyone else is a patientard.
I don’t know if you followed the link on my most recent entry at PF. It takes you to a moral genius’s blog who attempted to put down my living will warning post without informing me of his put down.
He wrote it as if nobody ever had reasons to doubt that every doctor is a saint.
He wrote as if all medical schools still required doctors to swear by Hippocrates.
He wrote as if even when they did, that the AMA strictly enforced it.
He wrote as if no doctor would ever use the power that the living will gives them to end a patient’s life maybe — just maybe — because some moneyed sources had need for a spare part (greed) or two (:drool: driving ’em to place ads for attorneys whose clients have living wills on record).
He wrote as if no doctor ever worked for an HMO that disliked losing money by keeping you alive.
Nowhere did my detractor, in his defense of the living will concept “with only the patient’s wishes in mind,” ever address the question I had raised to begin with: “Isn’t possible you might fall into the hands of a doctor who had reasons to let you die for other than the reasons you’ve seen discused?”
He simply ignored it.
His willful evasion stretches to the breaking point any trust one might wish they could keep that his intentions (and that of many other proponents of the living will) are entirely innocent.
The surgery is probably all good. (I have gone under the knife many a time) But I would recommend talking to the anesthesiologist about the anesthesia he/she plans to use.
Check for drug interactions ande side affects.
Been there. Done that. Just sayin’…
Good idea, Richmond. I’ll add that to the list.