Or . . . "Shit Happens, or Sometimes It Doesn't, And Then You Have a Real Problem"
These are the facts of the case: Our daughter was severely constipated. She vomited intermittently, was awake nights, and was generally not herself for exactly one week. We spent at least 9 hours in two emergency rooms and three hours in her pediatrician's office to make this determination. Additionally, we drove four hours round trip to go to the second ER. I've not received the bill yet, and we do have insurance. Everything from appendicitis to kinked bowels was entertained as a probable cause. She was X-rayed three times, and a CT Scan was suggested. Blood work was done, IV fluid was administered. We are not crazy, as far as I know.
A chronology of the events might bore, so I will try to limit myself to pondering the following themes: the diagnostic personalities of doctors, humorous commentary by daughter, radiation, boredom, confusion, and more humorous commentary by daughter.
We saw no less than five doctors in the course of our adventure. They ranged from the bad ass expert to the tentative wimp, and they all seemed to be in the wrong places. We are told to have a family doctor for ourselves and a pediatrician for our child is to avoid the perils of the poor masses throwing themselves at the mercy of the ER. Ironically, the ER, responsible for making sure you are not actively dying, resides in a hospital where all of the expensive testing equipment, presumably designed to give a nuanced picture of how you are living-- not dying, happens to be located. Our family physician does not even have the luxury of timely blood work at her disposal. An entire essay could be written on each individual doctor's approach, but suffice it to say, none of it made a profound difference. The fault there was probably ours. Let's be fair, we'd taken our daughter to doctors because we were extremely worried about some mysterious ailment--she was plugged up. Unfortunately, when the billable hour approaches $300.00, "go home and buy a gentle laxative," seems trite, and so it took long time for someone to get to that conclusion.
Quinn seemed to enjoy the parts of the adventure that didn't involve water or lozenges being placed in her colon. Both X-rays sessions were exciting for her. Even the grown up hospital had cartoons in the exam room! Her most memorable quote may have been, between the second and third sepositories, (to the nurse, who was female) "you're not gonna stick anything else in my buns, you're freaking me out man."
On boredom, I find it odd that people who, even with insurance are expected to fork over hundreds, if not thousands of out of pocket dollars are supposed to expect that a three hour wait, followed by hours of waiting in an exam room is normal. I realize that anyone that works in an ER will find this offensive, and me naive. I'm not commenting on how we got here, or why. I'm only pointing out that the frustration is magnified for someone like me who thinks about these things. I fully acknowledge that we probably had no business in an emergency room. However, to our credit, our doctor had told us to go there--TWICE!!. It's none of the individuals involved fault, it's just really stupid. In no other industry are you asked to both pay top dollar, and sit on your hands for hours. Not even airlines are as guilty as doctors.
The confusion is the worst part, particularly for the parents. I don't know where the confusion comes from. Why are we talking about asymptomatic illnesses. Looking back it seems so obviously not the case, but as mentioned earlier, we discussed appendicitis, tangled bowels, serious infections, and I'm not sure what else. Everything we discussed involved a surgical solution. And billing for surgery was not a motivator. No one we spoke to would have performed or benefited from the surgery. That is not to say that no one we spoke to would have not been saved a lot of trouble if a surgical solution worked out. Additionally, if our wee lady had had a serious problem, no matter how improbable, and the doctors has suggested that she was simply plugged up--oh the consequences. Is this the source of confusion? Two reasonably reasonable parents, one healthy child, nine hours in the ER for constipation . . . . It's unreasonable to think that as soon as I touch (ostensibly to repair) a house I didn't build, I'm responsible for all of its defects moving forward. Just the same, I won't hold a doctor accountable for the improbability that takes my childs life. Oh, that's right, I probably would. Or at least think about it, and be offered a settlement. I really like her! I like to think more of myself, but I'm not going to ask a doctor I barely know to rely on the hope that my better self would prevail.
And yet, our dear's quips endure. After the reception of an enema and the resulting expulsion, she stated, "That was not awesome." And perhaps that captures it all. We struggled through it, and it was not awesome.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Through The Lense of A Daughter
I thought when we put the finishing touches on the family compound, I would enjoy more free time to write. It may be that I have a little more free time, but it doesn't feel like it--life just seems to expand. What's more, when I do get a minute, I'm finding real difficulty holding any thought in my mind at a suitable distance to comment on it. It always seemed terribly rude to write something intended for the eyes of others, if I knew it wasn't at all compelling. How presumptuous of me to assume that I would always be able to observe the interesting, think compelling thoughts and concisely illuminate them in words. My mind has been altered by fatherhood (or at least that seems the likely suspect) in such a way that, my experience of life is so compelling to me, that I'm having trouble stepping back and writing anything coherent about it.
Case in point: On the way to pick up my daughter this afternoon, I heard two back to back stories on the radio. The first was about the latest grisly murder of a hostage, at the hands of terrorists. This pilot was burned to death, in a cage. That brutality and evil is enough to give anyone pause. For me the added shame is that, the world, seems to be getting more dangerous, not less. And of course--my thoughts immediately jump to my daughter. I was afforded the opportunity to travel in my youth, and I figure it shaped my perception of the world in a positive way. I hope for this for my daughter, but in the best case she will be in greater danger than I was in my youth, or worse, she won't go. Just as I began to quietly succumb to my despair, the next story came on.
Harper Lee will publish a new novel! Perhaps she will illuminate some of the curiosities to which Scout has introduced my daughter. Quinn is not of an age where she will sit through To Kill A Mockingbird in nightly installments. That does not mean I haven't tried. She's heard enough to know that she relates to Scout, who seemingly can't mind her P's and Q's. And I know no one can enjoy failing measuring up to Atticus' patience and honor more than a man with his daughter squirming in the crook of his arm as he tries to read To Kill A Mockingbird to her.
Those two news stories took me through almost every spectrum of human emotion in less than five minutes. In my previous existence, the same thing could have happened, but lately I've found that life's volume knob seems to be stuck--at eleven. I have a dim sense of why this might be. My daughter is almost five, but she is small. She is also, in my opinion, on the ball. So you have this tiny person giving pretty concise running commentary on her life. This is mostly communicated in one liners that sound like she is channeling Mark Twain. But I maintain a memory of just four years ago, when this child was a helpless lump. The addition of a child has made each of my days pass like a second, and the whole of my years feel geologic in scale. This is pretty powerful as it is presented in my mind in an instant.
The Jordanian pilot who was burned alive, must have been an infant, and then a five year old boy, and those parents must feel devastation that I can at least imagine now. And the men who brutally took that life, they were children once, and now their evil reverberates around the globe. I feel that in a way that a man with no children might not. Harper Lee must have been a precocious five year old, and the goodness and insight that she has contributed to humanity; I can see how valuable that is, through the lense of a daughter. The value, understanding and empathy Lee captured in her story have reverberated around around the globe for over fifty years. And that is the only hope for the father of any child: Goodness has a longer shelf life than evil.
Case in point: On the way to pick up my daughter this afternoon, I heard two back to back stories on the radio. The first was about the latest grisly murder of a hostage, at the hands of terrorists. This pilot was burned to death, in a cage. That brutality and evil is enough to give anyone pause. For me the added shame is that, the world, seems to be getting more dangerous, not less. And of course--my thoughts immediately jump to my daughter. I was afforded the opportunity to travel in my youth, and I figure it shaped my perception of the world in a positive way. I hope for this for my daughter, but in the best case she will be in greater danger than I was in my youth, or worse, she won't go. Just as I began to quietly succumb to my despair, the next story came on.
Harper Lee will publish a new novel! Perhaps she will illuminate some of the curiosities to which Scout has introduced my daughter. Quinn is not of an age where she will sit through To Kill A Mockingbird in nightly installments. That does not mean I haven't tried. She's heard enough to know that she relates to Scout, who seemingly can't mind her P's and Q's. And I know no one can enjoy failing measuring up to Atticus' patience and honor more than a man with his daughter squirming in the crook of his arm as he tries to read To Kill A Mockingbird to her.
Those two news stories took me through almost every spectrum of human emotion in less than five minutes. In my previous existence, the same thing could have happened, but lately I've found that life's volume knob seems to be stuck--at eleven. I have a dim sense of why this might be. My daughter is almost five, but she is small. She is also, in my opinion, on the ball. So you have this tiny person giving pretty concise running commentary on her life. This is mostly communicated in one liners that sound like she is channeling Mark Twain. But I maintain a memory of just four years ago, when this child was a helpless lump. The addition of a child has made each of my days pass like a second, and the whole of my years feel geologic in scale. This is pretty powerful as it is presented in my mind in an instant.
The Jordanian pilot who was burned alive, must have been an infant, and then a five year old boy, and those parents must feel devastation that I can at least imagine now. And the men who brutally took that life, they were children once, and now their evil reverberates around the globe. I feel that in a way that a man with no children might not. Harper Lee must have been a precocious five year old, and the goodness and insight that she has contributed to humanity; I can see how valuable that is, through the lense of a daughter. The value, understanding and empathy Lee captured in her story have reverberated around around the globe for over fifty years. And that is the only hope for the father of any child: Goodness has a longer shelf life than evil.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)