Gasping While Help Is Just Out Of Grasp

 Today, I sat on the coach next to my breathless and frustrated friend. We reflected on the barriers we had encountered for him in the medical system the past three months, since he was discharged from a long hospital stay. We recounted how the iron infusion he had waited 5 weeks to get an appointment for, had once again been canceled. In the meantime he chews ice, as body compensation mechanism for low iron, and struggles for the necessary oxygen carrying capacity in his blood. Several weeks now, he's been asking his doctors for better medicines to help him breath. Through shallow breaths he utters this thought "there is no winning with the medical system, there is only trying to keep up."  This truthful phrase makes my eyes well up. I feel like I'm failing him. As a nurse I help him navigate the system, the phone calls, the cancelations, the lost orders, the miscoded bills, the cattle shoot style of the clinic. 

If I feel helpless, I can't even imagine how he feels. He even threw out the word "victim" today, referring the trying to navigate his health conditions with professionals. I work within the system and my hands are tied. I spend hours on the phone each week just trying to schedule appointments as phone lines are busy and orders get lost. Granted we live in what is considered a rural community. However, our clinics are tied to large medical centers in the nearby cities. 

Once he does get to see a clinician, their response to any concern he has is "let's run more tests." What happened to listening to your patient?  What happened to flying without your instruments and looking at your patient? Is this all a scam for facilities to milk money from the Medicare system and insurances? What is the cost to patient? Not the dollar cost, but the lost quality of life cost.

So many providers are hesitant to prescribe or actually recommend any treatment due to fear of litigation if something were to go wrong. Well something is going wrong, patients are dying due to provider neglect! Not neglect that stems from lack prescribing more procedures and test, but neglect in listening to and looking at their patients. As a holistic practitioner, I'm not one to think there's a pill or institutional treatment for every ailment. However, I know the limits of the human body and adjuncts to helping that human body. Prescribing is beyond my privileges and not something I would ever desire to do. With my friend, I guide him towards healthy lifestyle changes and he willingly makes those changes. 

I desire to work with prescribers in listening to their patients in a partnership style. Wow, those words just hit me "partnership style."  As life coach, I encourage my clients to partner with their providers. Partnership is not what my friend and I have experienced the last few month from his primary medical institution. Yes, many of the schedulers, nurses, and providers have been caring and compassionate. We recognize the system they draw their paycheck from doesn't value the patient prospective, patient experience, or patient outcome. Ultimately, that's likely why all these barriers to accessing care keep cropping up. 

I think the adjectives we would use to describe how we feel treated by the medical system most days are: ignored, unimportant, a burden, a liability, a paycheck. All of this leaves him still struggling to catch his breath. We know there are solutions to help him, however, we are swimming upstream trying to "catch up" to some of those solutions while his body continues to fail, despite positive lifestyle changes. Previous to the past few years, my friend was walking a specimen of an active and healthy person for the majority of his life. All he is asking for, is a little bit of that back through the technology of medicine in what he believes is "the greatest country on earth." The barriers created in the medical system continually keep his desire for a better quality life just out of his grasp.