No room for blame – patients, doctors and nurses all feel abandoned

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One morning in August this year, my husband woke up and told me he was feeling lucky. And indeed, the past year has been a good one with some health emergencies for either of us. But by the end of the afternoon, his urine was filled with blood.

In the 61 years that Ted and I have been married, we have faced many unexpected interruptions in our expectations. If youth is about the lust and beauty of love, then old age is about dedication to something greater than our individual selves. Blame and anger do not last when problems arise. We can and we come together and face what must be faced.

When Ted fell ill this time and went into adversarial mode, I encountered a medical system besieged by nearly two years of fighting COVID.

The urologist was out of town, but his medical assistant saw him after finding no infection in his urine and gave us an X-ray that day that found arterial bleeding. It was then that our insurance company rejected the doctor-approved procedure to solve the problem in the least invasive way possible. I filed an expedited review request which was quickly approved. It took a while for the insurance company to send the documents to the doctor and to us.

And then on November 9, the flow of blood resumed for over a week. I couldn’t think. I kept writing emails to all of our doctors and taking Ted to the independent lab for blood and urine tests. My husband, I thought, might die while the doctors and the insurance company do their papers.

I am not a rules person and I am never afraid to ask for help. But sometimes I forget to ask.

When I finally asked the urologist’s physician assistant to help us get the appointment with the radiologist, she replied that she had no control over another’s schedule. doctor. She said this as she was leaving the house, when I said, “We feel abandoned. “

She heard and turned to us, shutting the open door: “We have lost five of our nurses and two of them were childminders. She promised to try to call the radiologist before the end of the day.

And then I realized we all felt abandoned. No blame, no fault, no guilt – it’s just a fact.

I called the planner a bit later and told him we really needed an appointment ASAP. She replied, “I’m doing my best. It is not our fault.

I knew this feeling because I blamed myself for not trying hard enough or asking for help in a timely manner. And I know this woman is sitting in a cubicle all day trying to give everyone a chance.

But I asked, not attacked, as is sometimes my wish, and someone spoke to someone and at three in the afternoon we got a call from the programmer for early December.

We now have an appointment at a leading hospital in Texas Medical Center. The cardiologist approved the procedure, as did the urologist and general practitioners.

But it took almost four months to find out what was holding us back and even now, if hospitals experience another wave of COVID and beyond, we could still find ourselves on another waiting list and in need of a new approval for the same procedure.

When we went to the independent lab and the technician took possession of my husband’s urine sample, I watched as she made a sign of the cross on my husband’s red blood sample.

“Do you bless my husband’s urine?” ” I asked.

She turned to me: “Did you see that?”

“I did, thank you.”

Neither of us said what we both thought: he’s a dead man walking. This is what Ted says or thinks every day that heavy blood appears.

This procedure and my perseverance are not intended to save his life but to comfort him, to save him from a Foley catheter that must be emptied and irrigated every day when it becomes blocked.

We both recognize that we are already receiving the care and attention from the medical community that we so badly need as we live the last years, months or days of our lives together. And we are grateful. For each other and for all who touch our lives.

Jere Pfister is a writer and storyteller.

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