January went as advertised, a new attraction to SAD this year being a hydrocele, varicocele, and infection, which had me back at the Med Center, UNMC, the hospital I trust the most after years of medical malpractice suits, where my PCP--primary care physician--is and most of my operations have occurred. Hospitals are peculiar places, and the advice to spend as little time in them as possible is very wise. Until I developed a herniated cervical disc, the only hospital I had ever been in was a converted house in Bloomfield when I was very young, where I had a tonsillectomy, got to drink through a glass straw (well, it was a big deal then!), and the first treat upon leaving was a strawberry sundae at the Corner Drug Store at the time when it had a soda fountain with dark marble counter tops and high stools and, sitting apart, little wrought-iron cafe tables and chairs, with the twisted-metal heart-shaped backs. It also had a sheet music rack and a magazine stand I later found handy, as well as gifts, all of which made it a typical-but-special pharmacy of its day.
My first notions that all might not go well in hospitals came from an RN I once dated, who had experienced sponges left inside after operations and other sorts of good-grief stories.
Anyway, I did not have good times at Nebraska Methodist, where I had my first experience with a surgeon, an arrogant breed to match lawyers, who later led me into a royal battle with the insurance company so that I cancelled my policy and went without medical insurance for four or five years until the State offered other insurance company options. I also had my first inept phlebotomist: I think about the seventh time she poked me trying to find a good vein, I threatened to poke her. And two special events. After being injected with radioactive dye, I was whisked downstairs for a fluroscopy (?), a X-ray technique that looks comparable to the Off Air TV of whirling dots, except that the X-ray has body shapes and glitters beautifully. I was fascinated with the gorgeous light show. But my older sister was nearly hysterical, knowing that process was for cancer patients and figuring the family wasn't being told the bad news. Oh, well. Wrong room, wrong patient. For the second event I also lost my roommate by catching staphylococcus, the common "staph" always hovering in hospital air, which meant isolation and everything being discarded--higher prices suddenly--while I scratched furiously, drawing blood, at the terrible itching in my ears and eyebrows, on my cheeks, which I insist I have to this day with fiercely itchy eyebrows and ears, though my PCP says it is merely psoriasis. Incidentally, from the very beginning I've trusted the nurses more than the doctors but also know they are woefully overworked.
My second time there wasn't as eventful, once I got past a sniffy nurse who was upset that I had intruded on the schedule with an emergency visit after my bailiff had insisted. (I had had to use nitroglycerine on the way to the bus and at work.) I was on the very verge of a heart attack from a 95% blockage, discovered a few seconds after I got on the treadmill. My surgeon this time was a young, cheerful rock music enthusiast who listened to that noise while operating and made a teaching movie of the angioplasty and placement of my first stent; I also enjoyed him because he had a cardiac clinic at the Creighton hospital where my older sister worked and because he'd been a Boy Scout who'd contended with rattlesnakes while camped at the Battle of the Rosebud site in Montana, which I'd been to in my pursuit of Western history with emphasis on Indian battles. The little film was engrossing going into my heart; he said it was the best one he'd ever done. The only mishap was later when the tube into my groin was pulled out and I bled all over the place.
My next two operations were at the Med Center, where I had terrific nurses, male and female, and no problems. The double fusion at the bottom of my cervical and top of my thoracic spine was to correct the problem in my left hand and arm, very like carpal tunnel. The failure window was 15%, and unfortunately I went through that window and still have a problem there, one of the reasons I ultimately retired. I had to watch the angioplasty for the placement of my other five stents--one site couldn't be stented because it's at a Y--in the midst of the best nursing team I've ever experienced, including a husband-wife whom I would've liked as personal friends. I didn't tell anyone but my bailiff and judge, went in on a Wednesday for a mere test, got the chemical version of the treadmill with an international group of doctors from six different countries observing--UNMC is a teaching hospital, after all--had surgery the next day, went home on Saturday, and returned to work on Monday morning.
But then UNMC entered into a partnership with Clarkson next door, which is where I had my knee replacement and such a repetition of my Methodist experience that once again I felt as if I were caught in George C. Scott's black comedy, Hospital. My surgeon and I didn't get along from the beginning, and he lied to me, as I later discovered, telling me I would be able to hike and bike just as well as ever after the drastic surgery, though I'd be limited to carrying 50 pounds. Yeah, right. Mom hadn't had a happy experience at Clarkson years earlier, but I had little choice, the HMO dictating as usual. Anyway, I started with a pretty, very sweet anesthesiologist who talked me into an epidural, but that was given by her boss, the rudest medical man I've ever heard as I was disappearing, swearing and sarcastically scathing to her (not me). The Sweet Young Thing had told me the epidural would wear off in 12-24 hours, when I would be given new pain medication. More than 12 but considerably less than 24 hours later, I came to in agony, but the night anesthesiologist refused to do anything until the 24 hours was up. That is, he refused until I was hanging from the bar over my bed yelling and the nurse, at her station just outside my door, after having called him twice earlier, told him flatly he had to do something. This episode put me in the cardiac unit with drastic atrial fibrillation, my heart boinging from 60 to something like 260 pulses. While the cardiologists were trying to get that quieted down, a tech took me down to be X-rayed and shut the surgical leg in the elevator doors. I did a lot of yelling in this fortnight. (I'm a very polite patient; I mean yelling of the Big-Ouch-Damn-That-Hurt kind.) The next day or so, a nurse insisted I get up and sit in the chair, which led to a serious catheter accident completely blocking my urethra, those complications taking up much time over the next week. I had really bad phlebotomists, including one I told never to come back and one who started to weep in frustration and finally went off to find a substitute. I was transferred to a room with a very spoiled Hispanic teenager who would order big meals and then would eat almost nothing because his family would bring him bags full at night and his grandmothers would cater to him at noon, besides which he got to dictate the room terms. I complained about the late-night food visits but otherwise used diplomacy so that we ended up OK, but it took a lot of Zen. Next, the therapist, not the doctors, discovered I had a blood clot below the surgical knee. When I was taken later for tests on that clot, one tech snapped my elastic hose into my groin; returning to the room, another tech accidentally collapsed the back of the wheel chair, luckily catching me. My favorite tech slipped and cracked the back of her skull on the tile floor. My orthopedic surgeon visited me once and just shook his head. After working on mere mobility, the physical therapist showed me how to go up and down stairs just before I left; she allowed me only two practices, the second grudgingly at my insistence. When my younger sister took me home, I forgot what little I hadn't learned well and fell down the front steps, catching myself on the banister to swing myself around enough not to fall on the new knee. (I was later to have an accident on my stairs which swelled my knee up the worst it ever was and cut short my physical therapy sessions within the allotted insurance time.)
My younger sister was to have an arthroscopy at another hospital. The surgeon went through the motions, and she was even assigned to therapy afterwards--until a lawyer friend's sister, a nurse on the operating team, told the lawyer the doctor had not actually operated but had thrown a tantrum about the operating equipment, hurling the tray of scalpels and whatever against the wall. My sister got a quiet settlement and a proper arthroscopy at the Med Center.
I actually didn't intend to write about medical problems, really personal affairs; but what happened was mordantly funny, as my title suggests. I am not whining. (All I did was yell when it was too excruciating.) I never sued anyone, though I felt like whacking a few. But I know where I'm not going back to. And I will say flatly that people should investigate when possible. They might begin by checking out medical malpractice suits. One surgeon, in our courtroom several times on sinus-surgery lawsuits, has four or five computer screens of malpractice suits he's glibly learned to beat. From him and others I would urge anyone to avoid sinus surgery, very iffy at best, which generally ends up involving more than one surgeon along the sequence to correct mistakes so that no one can be blamed when juries are asked to decide who did what. I would likewise recommend never having tubes in children's ears. One suit of ours involved a little boy's paralysis; but the medical records were all destroyed, the doctors deliberately stonewalled, staff were shunted off, so that the truth wasn't won until the plaintiff lawyers found many persistent years later an operating-room nurse who had been moved to Florida who was persuaded to tell what actually happened in the surgery. So I guess, when I say, "Take care," I really mean it.
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