This is a post about healthcare in America and the people who mis-practice it, and not about insurance benefits or the costs of healthcare or even about recipients who qualify. I’ll leave that discussion to the political pundits and Michael Moore who know so much more about it than I do.

I’ve seen more than my share of doctors, nurses, therapists, and pharmacists making huge mistakes, enough to kill somebody. And oftentimes, they do.

The practice of medicine is just a random art. My son coined that phrase when he was a college freshman and developed Lupus Anti-Coagulant, a clotting disorder. He almost double-dosed on Coumadin, the drug that is intended to keep blood clots from forming, when the IV was handling the dose of Coumadin and some nurse brought the same Coumadin in pill form. He had the wherewithal to refuse the pill.

But what if he were groggy and didn’t? What if it were some elderly persons who would do exactly what they were told to do and swallow the pill? I don’t know, but my son and I weren’t patients back then and didn’t really care.

What does the practice of medicine as a random art mean? As I see it, these healthcare professionals just take an educated guess that makes them like the weather people. Read more…

The biggest problem I had was with my body not functioning like it used to. I wasn’t walking independently, and sitting on a regular chair was a challenge. But that’s what the wheelchair was for. I didn’t need to walk–yet, and the wheelchair forced me to sit upright, even if the staff had to strap me in. But all systems were “go,” if you got my drift, and that was one less thing to worry about.

It was in the beginning of the fourth week at Rehab X that I had a problem that I couldn’t surmount. It involved a CNA (no surprise there) and getting up in the middle of the night. Your first question would probably be, “What was I doing up in the middle of the night?”

But if you really thought about it for a nanosecond, you will probably come with the answer: I had to go to the bathroom, and that was because I kept hydrated all day, so afraid my “peeing” would stop working again. That was MY idea, but the doctor assured me that wasn’t the case. I didn’t wholeheartedly believe him and I was incurring another problem: skepticism.

I awakened at 3am, even with my headset, to the sound of snoring. Read more…

I always wonder about people who do odd, compulsive things. Take voyeurism, for example. Voyeurism is French meaning “one who looks.” In popular wisdom, voyeurism occurs when somebody views or photographs or films others without their awareness. In common vernacular, voyeurism can be defined as “a peeping Tom.”

Now for some trivia on a non-trivial topic: In England, voyeurism became a criminal offense in 2004, if the subject didn’t know he or she was being viewed. In Canada, voyeurism became a sexual offense in 2005 by the same guidelines as England. In the United States, voyeurism can be both a criminal and sexual offense, and may have the guilty party register on the Sex Offenders List.

And there’s more. In Saudi Arabia, the sale of camera phones was banned for about a year because of non-consensual pics but reversed in 2005 only because cellular companies wouldn’t be able to offer complete 3G services if camera phones weren’t included. In South Korea, the government requires that all camera phones elicit an audible noise whenever someone snaps a picture. In places like Afghanistan and Iran, voyeurism can lead to, well, who knows. The point is, voyeurism is annoying, to say the least.

Sorry to say, I had my own experience with a voyeur at the nursing home. Read more…

People are funny, and I don’t mean in a ha-ha sort of way. They could be neurotic, bi-polar, obsessive-compulsive, anxious, or agoraphobic, just to name a few types. Some of the ones who came to visit me had their own type: dysfunctional-when-meeting-a-stroke-patient.

Even though they had good intentions, in all fairness to me, some of them said and did things that were downright insulting, if I took the comments and body language personally. But I didn’t ever, for those people who took the time and came to visit me.

In all fairness to them, how could they know the right responses from the wrong. What it really comes down to is this: How do you speak to a stroke patient whose had her life turned around in a 180-degree spin?

I made a list of the top ten things you should never say or do to a stroke patient, and I, too, have been guilty of most of them before having my stroke when I visited stroke patients. So having set the record straight, here goes.

1. Saying good girl, good boy, good job

Those are phrases you should say to your pets when they are being rewarded with a “Pup-Peroni” or Doritos’ chips. Read more…

This no-talking situation was really starting to get to me, big time. I thought, What if I didn’t say another word for the rest of my life? What if I had to motion to things constantly and nobody paid attention? What if there was an emergency and I couldn’t call for help?

The what-if questions were making me anxious and depressed. I didn’t have one thought about what I should do. But then I realized something that shook my innards to the core. I was becoming invisible to others. And that feeling of invisibility, that I couldn’t go on this way forever, became my modus operandi to do something about it.

About three weeks into Rehab X, it was just about lunchtime and I had concluded my morning therapy. The Transport guy delivered me to my room and I nabbed a CNA to help me into bed. I was going to take a quick power nap before therapy would resume again. I could smell the food in the hallways but by this time, I had gotten used to not eating. I just applied another layer of Vaseline to my cracked lips–the same hand to squeeze the tube and apply it–when an LPN walked in unannounced. Read more…

After the gift basket lady from Rehab X left me with stroke-related and other assorted take-aways, a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA), which had her name and her title right on her tag, helped me into bed because I couldn’t help myself. She left right away and, it seemed, she couldn’t get away fast enough. I wondered, does everybody treat stroke patients this way? Not even a “hi, how are you?” or “what good weather we’re having.” The CNA offered nothing.

I didn’t know what a CNA was, but I found out soon enough. They were the people who give showers, brushed hair and teeth, cleaned up urine and poop, helped with the meals, and a couple of other activities, in no particular order.

It soon became obvious: there were not enough CNAs at Rehab X to go around, or they were hiding and didn’t want to be found. If I had to guess, the typical CNA was overworked and underpaid, so I think they were hiding. There were about five places a CNA could hide and not be found for much of the day.

How do I know? To everyone else but a select few, I appeared to be a non-talker, which I was, and a non-thinker. Read more…

[Editor's note: This article is second in the series, The Tales of a Stroke Patient. You can access the other articles here.]

I was still thinking, a week later, of the nurse who told me about her infant sister who had a stroke. There was something about that story.

Anyway, I made it through the weekend, continuing with the Lovenox. The headache would come shortly.

It was Monday, April 6. I worked all day Monday with some pain still in my legs, training the new people who came to the firm, and worked on Tuesday as well. I wanted to save my days for a vacation, a vacation that would never come.

Tuesday evening, when I was ready to leave work, my manager wanted to know if I could stop by and have dinner with the Information Services people from the Applications group. Applications was planning an upgrade and there was so much food, she said. I agreed. But if I knew that the stroke would be ravaging my body in about ten hours, I would probably have elected to go shopping instead. That’s the thing about choices. Sometimes you just don’t know.

The party was Mexican fare and I went back for seconds. Read more…

[Editor's note: This article is second in the series, The Tales of a Stroke Patient. You can access the other articles here.]

I went to the closest hospital on Sunday before noon, and now it was Monday, 1:30 am. I was still in the ER. A room was finally available. The nurse assigned to my care told me the story about her sister who developed a stroke when she was an infant.

I don’t know why she told me that story. It was, after all, the middle of the night, and I was tired. But she was trying to prepare me, and I didn’t get it. A stroke wasn’t in my frame of reference. Not at all.

During the next two days, I was given more blood tests, but the tests were few and far between. So I just laid in the hospital bed watching television. The nurse would come in and ask me if I wanted anything, and I started to feel like I was on vacation. I continued not to get it.

At one point, a hematologist, assigned by the hospital, put me on Lovenox, an injectable blood thinner, for thirty days, at a twice-a-day dose totaling 160 mg, to break up the clots. Read more…

[Editor's note: This article is first in the series, The Tales of a Stroke Patient. You can access the other articles here.]

I can’t really say what happened when I had my stroke on April 8, 2009, because I was unconscious for eight days after. But I can tell you about some events before, like the pain in my legs beginning on March 26, 2009, and my unbearable headache the night before the episode that would change my life forever.

But a stroke was the furthest thing from my mind. It was something that happened to other people, meaning not me, which leads me to believe, if I could have a stroke, anybody could have a stroke. I’ll begin just before events started to become alarming.

It was in late March when I got into the elevator as I left the law firm in Philadelphia, staggering to my car a half block away from severe pain in my heels, feet and ankles. I was employed at Cozen O’Connor as a Technical Trainer, and though I didn’t mind at all standing on my feet throughout the day, I was so aware of it now.

My home was near Philadelphia, but I had plans with my friend in New Jersey. Read more…

[Editor's note: This article is part of the series, The Tales of a Stroke Patient. You can access the other articles here.]

The 27-year-old analysis, including 28 studies of more than 300,000 people, determined there were 8,478 strokes. Depressed people were 45% more likely to experience any type of stroke than those who were not depressed. They were also at 55% increased risk for dying from that stroke.

We have Netflix, and it’s especially useful in the winter when there’s no point in taking a trek outside. I watched “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” last week, sort of knowing what it was about but not realizing the impact it would have on me. (Seriously, I should have known).

The 1980s film features Richard Dreyfuss as sculptor Ken Harrison, who became a quadriplegic after a car accident, and who’s hell-bent on the right to end his life. Also featured are Bob Balaban as a lawyer who helps Harrison achieve his wish for death by stopping the dialysis and being discharged, John Cassavetes as Dr. Emerson, who is determined to keep his patient alive even against Harrison’s wishes, and Christine Lahti as Clare Scott, a doctor who falls in love with Harrison. Read more…