Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Big Fish?
You know what I think?
(Warning: Serious Rant Just Ahead.)
I think that people in the medical profession—especially those old-school docs who believe that a patient and her family members should be seen, not heard, and heavily billed—should go ahead and figure out that some of us have google and know how to search it.
Because you know what? One of these days, I may pull this particular blog post out of the fallible archives and say “See here? When I documented for the entire Internet that before you dismissed my mother-in-law from the hospital on December 18, 2006, I googled ‘Vitamin B12 deficiency cancer,’ I didn’t do it for grins.”
Adele’s been in the hospital three times in six weeks. And spent two of those six weeks in a nursing home. Today, though, they’re sending her back to her assisted living apartment. Not only do they not know why she’s having these extreme bouts of dizziness and very low blood pressure (and I do understand that things like this aren’t always diagnoseable), but now Dr. G. is denying that she has non-exixtent B-12, a condition that’s been well-established in the past month.
See, in June of 2005, Adele had a near-death experience resulting in surgery to remove horrible abscesses which were wrapped around and connecting her gall bladder, liver, pancreas and etc. Then she’s told last month that she’s not absorbing B-12, which can cause all kinds of symptoms like dizziness, dementia, and neurological damage, some of which may be irreversible even if the vitamin problem is corrected.
Two days ago, a different doctor told the family that he was ordering consults with a hematologist and an oncologist, but he didn’t tell them what exactly he might be looking for.
So I google and find out that when certain abdominal surgeries are performed on an elderly person, B-12 should be automatically given by injection afterwards because the surgery may interfere with the body’s ability to absorb the vitamin if taken orally. And then the information went on to say that in a subset of patients who are not treated thusly, stomach cancer develops.
Hence, I suspect, the mention of an oncology consult. But even if they found something like stomach cancer, there’s not much they’d do about it. It’s usually discovered way late in the game, and she’s far too fragile for chemo or more surgery. Besides, little symptoms like losing a gazillion pounds without trying and having bouts of diarrhea don’t mean much in the bigger picture, do they? Purely incidental findings, wouldn’t you say?
Of course, none of this matters at all, because the good news is that as of today, all consults are off! And guess what? Not only are they not going to give her the daily shots they prescribed last night as being absolutely essential to turning her situation around, but she doesn’t have a B-12 deficiency at all! Ha! Such fun we’re having with her and her kids, jerking them around with all our talk about tests and specialists!!!
We’re sending Adele home, to live out her last days in the kind of oblivion formerly enjoyed by everyone, before google made it so pesky family members could figure out what the heck was going on by keying in a couple well-placed key words! Surely Adele’s family doesn’t include anyone who actually uses the Internet, does it?
She may be fine, people, but my head is spinning from all the back-pedaling I’ve witnessed in the last 48 hours. So I thought I’d just get it documented right here, right now.
I hope they’re telling the truth and I can’t read plain English. That would make everything much simpler going forward. But right now, something smells mighty fishy, and I’m no where near a Joe’s Crabshack.
- Adele's been home all of four hours. We just got the call that the ambulance is on its way to pick her up. Now they can't find a blood pressure reading on her at all. See what I mean?
Posted by Katy on 12/18/06 at 07:59 PM
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