By the time we arrived at the VA I was really out of it with pain. The movement, the ride down, the EMT clown who slammed my back with the rail, all did me in. They wheeled me into a large building, down a series of hallways and tunnels and finally up an elevator and into a room. The EMT’s stood by as I got myself from the gurney and onto the waiting bed, supposedly the only one available in the entire hospital. It would turn out I was in a section called Acute Care. That would soon turn out to be an oxymoron.
If I thought the ride down was bad, which I did, I truly had seen nothing yet, I’d entered another world altogether. The two EMT’s, without a word to me, leave my room with my paperwork in hand and I hear them talking to someone outside. I can only think Thank God, the nurses will be in and I’ll get back on morphine. But then no one comes in. Fifteen minutes go by, then thirty and no one. I reach for the nurses call button and there is none on my bed. Being a quick study I realize that Dorothy, or Ed in this case, ain’t in Kansas (or Montana) anymore. My friend from Texas was right, I had entered his world of the VA and it looked pretty ugly.
It was a little after half an hour from my arrival when I nice young man, presumably a nurse, he didn’t say jack, came in and placed an arm band on my wrist, complete with bar code of course. I said, “Thanks man but I need some morphine”. He promptly told me he couldn’t do that the duty nurse would have to help me. As he sealed the wrist band together nice and firm, he said, “This means you are part of our team now”. I wanted to hit him.
At about the hour mark my daughter, who lives an hour outside Salt Lake, arrived and got in the mix. I was quickly realizing you better be of sound mind and have help to navigate what was about to happen in this place. The sad thing is I spent a month in the Montana VA hospital in 06’ for left side kidney stones and complications and that is where I first saw that well over half the veterans in there have no one and just have to take what is dished out. It’s not too bad in Montana, actually pretty good, but here in Salt Lake, that was about to go from bad to butt ugly.
I was glad that my daughter was on board; she is no wall flower and went in search of a nurse. It was an hour and fifteen minutes before ‘my’ nurse came in. By now I was not well, I needed something for pain and I needed it right away. My first of many problems came when my nurse, speaking barely understandable English, announced, “English is my second language”. She then went on to tell us all about how she had worked at nearby Primary Hospital for twenty-four years and how the VA sucked. You can imagine how comforting this was having just arrived for treatment.
My nurse came and went as she tried, she said, to find a Doctor who could authorize my medication. Another hour went by and I had tied all the knots I could in my rope to hang on. It was in a word, awful. About two and a half hours into my stay my nurse and another came into my room with a morphine drip machine in tow. Finally, I thought, some relief. And, an hour and fifteen minutes later they had it set up. I stood there and witnessed, as did my daughter, two nurses work for an hour and fifteen minutes, with an instruction book in hand, trying to set up the ‘new’ morphine drip machine.
If you find it unbelievable, imagine being the one laying there with a number 10 pain level. Being nice to them was very difficult. I was trying, my daughter was trying and after all that time they announced me good to go. Ah, relief at last. Well, not so fast. My daughter says, “Dad, are you getting any relief yet?” And in fact I wasn’t. It had only been fifteen or twenty minutes but it should be coming. I looked up above my head where the machine was placed and low and behold I didn’t see a drip in the lines. My daughter came over and checked it and realized the machine wasn’t turned on. Can you imagine? It wasn’t turned on after all of that!
My daughter is pretty fired up at this point and leaves in search of our nurse. Fifteen minutes later she is back and realized, this is the English as a second language one, that she had in fact ‘not’ turned it on. She turns it on and realized the batteries are dead. Well, what else could go wrong? I was about to find out.
Three and a half hours after my arrival my relief started, barely. They handed me the little button to push when I needed it and supposedly set it up to drip in a certain amount as they had in Montana and then I could add additional at a certain interval. I’d soon realize I really wasn’t in Kansas anymore, the invisible Doctor I had yet to see had them set it up that I had to push it to get any medication. That meant every fifteen minutes I could take a shot but then I’d have to punch it again in fifteen more minutes … so much for sleep.
It was nearing midnight and I was exhausted, my daughter likewise, and I had some relief with pain hovering around a 7 with the Mickey Mouse set up I’d been given. The nurse enters the room with some pills, medication for me to take. I might add that all the while the poor fellow in the bed next to me, laying there with a tracheotomy and gurgling all the time, was in obvious pain with no attention, back to that later.
My nurse announces that the medications are for me. Now I take about three pills at night, not the seven or eight she had laid out for me. She also has a needle in her hand. I ask, “What’s the needle for?” She is a little irritated with me at this point and explains to me rather briskly that it is my ‘insulin’ shot. I tell her I don’t take insulin. She says and I quote with a witness, “We give all our diabetic patients insulin”. I am in shock for a minute or two. I worked hard all year to get my Type II diabetes under control and when I left Montana VA they checked it and my blood sugar was 102. And, here in the Great Salt Lake they hadn’t even checked it yet but were going to give me insulin.
“Ma’m, you’re not giving me no insulin”. I announce less than nicely. She leaves irritated after I ask her to tell me what all the other medications she brought that I have no idea what they are. When I ask her to tell me what they are for she gives me the official name of each, which means nothing to me, she could have been speaking Spanish. While she is gone I tell my daughter to get in to her laptop and find out what they are. She does and we’re confused but know a little more.
When she returns I ask again for an explanation. She has another nurse with her this time, perhaps as a witness I don’t know. She finally says, “I don’t know, your Doctor ordered them”. I point out that it is near midnight, I arrived around 6 PM and haven’t seen a Doctor, so who would he or she be? Frustrated she throws up her arms and says, “Well then I have to put in here (the computer) that you refused your medications!”
“Well you put that in there then Ma’am. I am taking none of your medications until I see a Doctor. And it is midnight, everybody out of my room, everybody!” I needed peace and sleep. They were all shocked but left the room. My daughter left but before she did she got the nurse for the guy in the next bed, who was gurgling and moaning and sounded bad. She went out and found our nurse, the one we shared, and told her. The nurse returned, and you cannot make this stuff up, reality is far too good, and she says to the poor fellow, “What is your pain level?” He groans out an answer. “Oh, I think it is about an 8.5”. The nurse very quickly asks, “Would you like to hold it there or do you want something?” I nearly had to restrain my daughter. Thus ended, night one of my introduction to the heart of socialized medicine.
Part Three Tomorrow
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