Disconnect

It has been slow going for Wife since she's returned from the hospital. The first few days she was totally exhausted most of the time. The last couple of days (a week since the event initiated) she has been showing noticeable improvement. But in the aftermath of the event (don't know what else to call it), She and I have been doing a lot of reflection on the experience with the medical system.

On Thursday, Wife had her first follow-up appointment with her primary care doctor since the event. Let me ask you. How would you react to these words.

• You could have died!
• You had a MASSIVE clot
• They were very close to going into surgery to pull it out

 Here is how Wife and I reacted.

Wide Eyed Fear and a feeling of being totally shaken up emotionally.

And this is after the event. 

This was immediately followed by questions...a LOT of questions and ruminations..

Why didn't we hear any words like this while we were in the hospital system indicating the severity of the problem? There was one person only, the technician who put Wife on the Heparin drip when he told me to stay the night, who verbalized "this is serious. You need to be here."

Virtually all the rest of the communication was kind of matter of fact or incomplete. 

"We're going to do this. And if that is good, we're going to send you home."  

"Why am I on a liquid diet? We don't know. We'll find out. (Much later). They wanted you to be ready if you had to go to surgery." Oh why didn't anyone tell us that? And why was she going to need surgery?

The hospital doctors saying, "We're sending you home. Take it easy for a week. Then you should be able to start doing your normal things." Versus the primary care doctor, "You just had a major trauma to your body. You need to take it easy. This is going to take a while to recover."

As we reflect upon the experience, we recognize on one hand that many parts of the system didn't seem to know what our situation was. Maybe they are so overwhelmed that they can't know what is going on with each patient. But on another level, there was clearly some kind of communication and discussion going on between the hospital doctor, the vascular surgeon, and maybe others where they were making decisions on the pathway of Wife's care. It seems as if our primary care doctor was aware of this. How come we weren't brought into the loop? Are the patient and their loved ones just extras in this drama?

So in addition to the emotion we've been feeling, there has been a lot of talk about what do we do when the next even takes place. Because at our age another even IS going to take place.