I’ve just been swamped and haven’t had the time or the desire to write… and I’m recovering from surgery at the moment.
I swear the next person who tells me how awful our health care system is is going to get slapped… Like most people I try to avoid doctors and hospitals as much as possible, but I couldn’t escape them this time. Everyone I dealt with from my doctor to the nurses aids in the hospital were top notch!
Anyway here’s the short version of the story… I started feeling a little queasy while celebrating my birthday with friends earlier this month… That was Wednesday night, by Thursday morning I was miserable enough to know something wasn’t right so I called my doctor’s office and made an appointment see him that afternoon. Roughly 2 hours later was having CT scan to confirm what training and experience told him was appendicitis… A little more than an hour later is was in the emergency room getting IV antibiotics and waiting for surgery. Truth be told that was the longest and most annoying part of the whole process, I spent about 5 hours in the ER before I was taken up for surgery at around 10:00 p.m.
There was no fighting with insurance companies or trivial bullshit of any kind… The system simply worked just as it does for vast majority of Americans everyday. There is a fundamental difference between access to health care and access to health insurance… that’s something that’s been lost in the debate on health care reform. Our health care system is not broken, it has faults, but the issue is not access to health care… It’s access to affordable health insurance and there are ways of providing affordable health insurance coverage to those who want it without effectively blowing up our entire health care system.
Oh and for the record… Nothing says Happy Birthday like appendicitis!