My days with the medical system

I guess I got spoiled by having the same doctor treating me for almost 20 years. Dr. Moser was always a kind, reassuring presence. I knew that if I had to go the doctor, I'd see him, and that I'd always feel better soon afterwards. His care was always prompt and effective. Even when i went in witha n absess (I'm guessing that's what it was) on my back in the summer of 1994, there was no pussy-footing around. I went in to the office, got called back, one of the nurses took my weight, height, temp and blood pressure (as they did every other occassion I'd been there, regardless of what I was there for), and within a few minutes, Dr. Moser came in, looked at the lump on my back, then took me into his little operating room, drained the thing, gave me some pills and some instructions on how to care for the thing, and within a day I was feeling back to normal.

I've sort of dreaded going to doctors when I moved away from PA, because I sort of knew or intuited that I had been very lucky up to that point with regards to my medical care. Enough people had complained about it, either directly to me or I had seen stories on the news, that I knew that anyone besides Dr. Moser would be a let-down. And with this new absess episode during the past week, I've been more or less proven correct.

Not that I think Dr. Matias is necessarily a quack (something I accused her of in a phone call to Jenn last Thursday), just that she is not the type of doctor who would take the quicker measures to get this particular patient of hers out of suffering. I went in last Tuesday morning with a sizeable lump under my left arm that was causing considerable pain, to the point where I'd had, to that point, about 4 hours sleep in two days. I expected to be able to go in there, have her look at it, realize that I needed it lanced, go ahed and do it, and then send me on my way. I experienced no such thing however.

When I got into her exam room, she looked at it, poked and prodded at it a bit (to my immense joy, let me tell you), and came to the startling conclusion that it was not yet "ripe" enough. Her solution was medicine... antibiotics to be precise. (Fortunately I've not abused antibiotics in my life, so I was at least a little hopeful that her more passive treatment method would work.)

A day later, things were only getting worse, and the pain was unmanageable, at least to my Aleve strategy. So, Jenn (having both a plethora of good ideas and my best interests at heart... and, it should be noted, the patience of an angel) said that I should phone Dr. Matias and see if she would call in a prescription pain killer for me. I did call, and she did quite quickly assent to calling in a codeine order for me (which was sort of surprising).

After three more sleepless nights of struggling with the (inadequate) doseage the little orange bottle recommended, on Saturday I took matters into my own hands and just kept feeding myself drugs. Whenever I felt a twinge of pain or could not find a comfortable position for my arm, I medicated. This, perhaps, was not the wisest move, or the best move for my stomach or liver, but after waking myself and Jenn up by screaming in pain Saturday morning, I got officially fed up with the way things were going and decided finally that, in this case at least, Doctor didn't know best.

Saturday was an enjoyable day, on the whole. I spent the good part of it drifting in and out of consciousness (finally), waking occassionally, and usually only long enough to ingest a treat Jenn had brought from Starbucks or my latest dosage. After getting a total of about 12 hours of sleep in the previous 5 days (including about 2 of those in my car, when the only comforable sleeping position became sitting upright in a chair that happened to be shaped like my driver's seat), I probably got about a total of 5 or 6 hours during the day Saturday.

Then came Sunday. I was up a good part of the night... slept about half an hour with Jenn (and by "sleeping" I mean sitting up in bed David Merrick-style nodding off until I start to tip over), read for a bit (I just bought the 2004 almanac, so there's been no shortage of fun stuff to read), then went out to my car again. It had started snowing and when I was outside (this was about 5:30 in the morning), the crews hadn't yet been through to plow, so the city seemed quiet and kind of deserted. When I got in the car and was warming it up, I started hearing the first reports of the possibility that Saddam Hussein had been captured. So I fought through the codeine-induced haze and managed to stay awake long enough to hear the press conference where they went, "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him." I then drifted in and out of sleep til about 8, when I went back in to attempt to sleep with Jenn again. I stayed in bed until the pain started waking me up again in the late morning or early afternoon, and that was when I decided I would not be going to yet another Malcolm rehearsal (the first two rehearsals I've missed for CR in my four seasons there... and hopefully my last two). The presence (because by yesterday afternoon, it was far more than just a lump) had become so intrusively large that I could no longer find a comfortable position for my arm. And, because of my indulgence the day before, I couldn't really treat myself to more codeine, else I would have run out far earlier than the doctor expected me to (she'd given me 7.5 days worth, and Sunday was just day 4). So I resumed the Aleve regimen, which didn't really work at all, but at least kept the pain to a minimum. I dozed off for a bit, watch a bit of Firefly, watched a bit of football, dozed some more, put some laundry in and just tried to stay as immobile as I could.

I went to try to get some sleep around 1:30 last night, but was up and out of bed by 2:15 from pain. As I was getting up to get out of bed, I felt moisture on my shirt on my left side. And for the next two hours, I proceeded to have the most quality freak-out I've had in a very very long time. The short version is that the absess/presence decided it was tired of being cooped up in my arm, and decided it wanted to be on my shirt, and in half a roll of paper towels and toilet paper.

I finally went back to bed around 4:15 or 4:30, and, because the stress was no longer on my skin (which I'm sure was causing 80% of the pain I was feeling), I actually got some sleep.

I've left out the more gruesome details of the experience of last night, because I will either remember them without the aid of writing them down, horrifying as they were, or I will forget them, which will be a fine outcome.

So that leads me back to my critique of the medical system. If Dr. Matias had taken an aggressive stance with this thing, I would not have had to deal with any of what happened in the past five days. I would have been sore Wednesday, sure, and I probably would have had to dress the thing a few times, but I wouldn't have had to deal with the suffering I did. Maybe I'm just naive beyond compare for believing this, but it strikes me that doctors should want to alleviate pain first, regardless of how "ripe" something is (the "ripe" concept just gets more and more absurd every time I think about it, especially in regards to my experience of the last 12 hours).

But that does not appear to be the world I live in any longer. I now apparently live in a world with a medical profession that prefers - perhaps even endorses - passive, pharmaceutical treatments over actual patient care.

And that sucks.