"YOU have a metal allergy!" the nurse said as she slapped a red bracelet on my wrist. It was the third or fourth I'd received that day, and my arms were by that time a rainbow of different ID tags. The diagnosis sounded as accusatory as it was triumphant, as if she was playing a game of chess and had just checkmated her opponent's King.
I was in the emergency room, having collapsed from dehydration in the summer heat after suffering from food-borne illness. For the next four days, I would be treated more like an enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay than a sick and possibly dying patient. Due to a shortage of beds, I would be transferred to a quarantined cell alongside many others, some of whom could not even walk or talk, and who had been held in what I can only describe as captivity for upwards of a week. I would then be sedated, and lose all recollection of what transpired next, including how I had come to place my signature on the many "consent" forms that served as my supposed acquiescence to how I had been treated. To this day I can only imagine them having held a gun to my head as they demanded I sign the forms, like they do in films.
I was eventually told after the fact that I had been a model patient, which left me wondering how exactly they treated their more problematic cases. And once I was finally released from my quarantined cell, and given a hospital bed, I found myself surrounded by many other disgruntled patients, all of whom were demanding malpractice attorneys. It was overall a hellish experience, and one that I hope to never have to live through again, though I know I likely will, because to this day not much has changed in hospitals across America.
A lot of the emphasis in healthcare reform has been placed on patient coverage, administrative overhead, bringing costs down, etc, but to me such approaches are for the most part hacking at the branches of the problems facing the healthcare industry. The true problem is, at its roots, a cultural one. And for anything to change for the better, our society's entire approach to healthcare must change. Specifically, it must change from blaming the patient for their illness, to sympathizing with the patient. That once sacred relationship between doctor and patient must be restored, becoming less adversarial and more cooperative. And until that happens, "doctors" cannot truly be considered doctors, nor can "nurses" be considered nurses, nor "surgeons" considered surgeons, etc. As long as that key ingredient of empathy is lacking from patient care, nothing will change. And until we treat hospitals less like courts of law, where patients stand accused of illnesses to be sentenced to either debt slavery or execution by negligence, then nothing overall will improve.
My visit to the hospital was not simply something I experienced, nor even something I endured, but something I survived, as surely as I had survived the dehydration that had brought me there. And I will not pretend that being a medical practitioner is an easy job. It certainly isn't. Nor am I asking hospital staff to perform miracles. Only to approach their jobs with the compassion that is demanded of one who deals with sick and frightened human beings dangling on death's edge. Because barring the most perverse interpretation of the natural laws of Karma, none of what I described in the above ordeal constitutes a crime. And where there is no violation of the law, there should be no punishment either.
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