I had to spend a couple days in the hospital. It is what it is, I feel like the people around me were way more stressed out about it than I was. For whatever reason, this sort of thing just doesn’t phase me. (I have heard that alcoholics specifically are exceedingly good in high-stress situations, which is part of the reason they’re so insane when life is just kind of boring.) But anyway.
A few observations I had during my stay in Pasadena about the experience and/or the state of the US healthcare system:
My view for a couple days
One: Repeating yourself becomes craze-inducing.
I had to answer the same set of questions about 17 or 18 times. Most of them were covered by my initial referral from my primary care physician. I couldn’t tell if doctors just never talk to one another (more on that later) or if the notes they take are just so brief that, even if the next one down the line reads it, so many details get left out that they have to ask again. Nobody seems on the same page and it creates a real sense of doubt.
Two: The profiteering is grotesque.
I take two daily psych meds and brought them both with me. Upon being admitted, the hospital confiscated these and said they will bring me their meds from their pharmacy each day I needed them. Of course, when they were brought up to me, the little individual packets were scanned into their system for an inevitable charge. (My 200mg dose pill was also broken up into two, 100mg doses for that extra charge.) On top of healthcare already being overpriced, this felt like outright theft.
Three: Conclusions are not really that conclusive.
After two-and-one-half days of procedures, tests, questions, and lying around waiting for the next set of procedures, tests, or questions, I had about four wrap-up visits with relatively high-up specialists or department heads. Each one gave me a generally different answer as to what their belief was as to why I ended up at the hospital to begin with. (To be fair, the initial issue was kind of wild.) But, like having to constantly repeat myself answering questions to begin with, leaving without actually having any confidence as to what was—and possibly still could be—wrong feels pretty disorienting.
Honestly, I had what was overall a good experience. My initial wait in the ER was just a few hours (granted I went at 10:00 pm). The hurry-up-and-wait parts of my visit were not out of hand. Everyone was nice. And still the only thought I had at the end was, Don’t get sick in America. The healthcare situation is so dismal here, I cannot understand why people defend it against the idea of a universal, public system.
