Better Health Care

5/11/11

How easy it is to be alive and just appreciate living a “normal” life. Spent the other night in RAH, surrounded by other normal people who’d had an accident of one kind or another. Actually 3 of the six ladies in my ward had broken their hip. I had severed my tendon in my little finger and had them re-attached that very morning and the other two, well one had injured her feet and the other, I don’t know.

I spent the day in various states of unreality as the pain swirled around my head and left me reeling. Lost most of the day really because the week quickly and quietly slipped past and suddenly it was Thursday. My daughter spent most of the day waiting with me as I was discharged and finally allowed to go home to her place where she had to care for me until Friday when my husband was finally able to come and pick me up.

What really bothered me the most was that we all had to live in one room with five other women! At first, while I was still “off my face” on the pain killers nothing really entered into my own little world. Did I make a nuisance of myself whilst “under”? I hope I wasn’t too much of a bother. I’m truly sorry if I was! Finally when it all settled down and I felt slightly even “normal”, I noticed that the three broken hipped ladies were in a lot of pain. I would have loved to have been able to get up and assist where possible! But that’s just me! Not just that but two of them were obviously suffering from dementia or something similar as they were constantly talking, yelling for people who weren’t there or just babbling on in their own language in their own little world.

The Italian lady was constantly calling for her family members and was actually restrained so that she couldn’t get up and do further injury to herself. She was crying out for water at one stage and so I got up and gave her a drink from her cup and held her hand. She made no eye contact and didn’t respond. It felt so bad not to be able to help her in some other way but my prayers were all that I had to give that day. The poor nurses were ever rushing about help one or another of us all as the day went by. The other dear lady spoke Croatian intermingled with the occasional English and was even having telephone conversations with people, though she had no mobile phone. When her doctor was with her, she spoke to the other doctor, behind him, though there was no-one there, as he said.

At the end of the day these two women were having conversations with each other though I doubt they understood a word the other uttered. One would start the calling and yelling and the other would follow suit. Though I had my eyes closed most of the day, I broke through the consciousness barrier a few times and watched what was going on around me. Poor Gwen next to me had the frightened eyes of a startled rabbit and just needed a comforting hand to hold. I was too far away from the Croatian lady to be able to interact with her but she was in my prayers also.

In our newspapers some of the mess of our hospital system filters through. What a terrible state this world is coming to when people will all different illnesses are put into one room to be cared for in one of our city hospitals. Nurses are abused when trying to restrain people with mental illness who should be in better care. Nurses are overworked and I certainly didn’t hear that many a “thank you” being said to them. I do not blame anyone but the government for these problems. How much money is being gathered by taxes that never get to our health system? How come politicians get pay rises when our own nurses have to struggle? How come the mental health system is such that when the mentally ill ask for help they may or may not be assessed before being plonked back into situations where someone is killed before anything is done? How come we have to wait and wait for operations that are necessary but aren’t done because of little or no funding?

I recall my parents telling me about the “free” health system in Hungary back in their day. Though it was free they still had to bribe the doctors with eggs, chickens or whatever they had, before the doctor would help. What about in Russia, after reading the story about a woman who went for a holiday in Moscow. As she had no family there, she was given the drugs she needed to help her recover from her broken hip, but not the food she needed to recover. No such thing as hospital food there, can’t complain in the language, can’t complain at all! If a nurse hadn’t befriended her and brought food, she would have died there. Does our system have to get that bad before we react? Where are all the voices needed to make these things happen? Do we care so little about things until it happens to us? What is going to happen as the world powers who dominate don’t care about the common or “normal” human being? Look at the USA’s health system. How many in the well-off country of the United States can’t afford to get the proper care their families need? Where is this world coming to?

Everyone who has a voice needs to speak up before it gets any worse!

We all need to lift our voices to stand up for those who have no voice!

Please think of what is to become of us should the worst possibilities occur! Stand up for our rights to better health care!