Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Steve Proper's avatar

Yikes, what a trip! Glad you're ok. As a physician early in my career, it is depressing how bad our system is in the US, and just hope that reform comes before I retire. Please take any time needed to recover, it sounds like the kind of trip that you need a vacation from afterward!

Expand full comment
Geoffrey G's avatar

You're going to hear this from a lot of other commenters, but you have no idea what kind of terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad experience you were spared because your appendix didn't actually explode. Twenty years ago, when I was in college, the exact same progression of symptoms befell me. Except, assuming myself hale and hearty and impervious to any threat to my life, I waited. Surely it was "food poisoning!" (Why do we always think this?)

By the time I finally got myself to the hospital and made it through *12 HOURS* of increasingly excruciating and desperate ER wait-room waiting, my appendix had well and truly burst its membranes. At this point it was clear to the attending doctors that I probably wasn't making up my symptoms or seeking pain meds and they rushed to to the OR. The fact that my appendix had sprayed infection all over my vulnerable insides somehow went undetected by the surgeon, who went about slicing me the laparoscopic way as if nothing had happened. After a few days, my profit-optimizing medical team rushed me out the door of the hospital without as much as a promised CAT scan. My doctor even berated me on the way out for having quite a bad attitude and not leaning into my recovery! "You must BELIEVE in health, Geoffrey!"

Several weeks later, I was on my second hospital stay, down to a skeletal half my body weight, literal hours from death by the post-op infection that the first team hadn't bothered to check on, on my second round of significantly more invasive surgery (I believe it would be more accurate to say I was gutted like a fish), forced to drop out of college on medical leave, and VERY bitter about my mistreatment at the hands of the American medical system. I had about eight months to ruminate on it, as I very slowly learned to eat solid food, breathe with more than 10% lung capacity, and haltingly walk again.

But I'm lucky because I'm alive. I learned afterward that my prognosis was about a 5% chance of survival. I was also lucky that I was still on my parents' insurance, since the bill they sent to the insurer was $85,000. Where I wasn't so lucky is how two-thirds of a year spent trying to not die delayed my graduation enough to land the start of my working life in the middle of the Great Recession. So my in-pocket post-graduate job prospects were gone and years of underemployment awaited, instead. I aged out of my parents' health insurance eventually, and thankfully nothing else too terrible happened to me while I was uninsured. But this emergency and its aftermath did set me on a very different path.

A path that, as fate would have it, brought me now to live in Scandinavia. Here, I have been party to many other medical emergencies within my family, but none of them addressed with such wanton callousness and neglect as I saw in an extremely expensive private American hospital. I often ask apologists for the American medical system whether they, themselves, have actually had a good experience the last time they visited the hospital or had to tangle with their insurer to pay for it. Because it's always awful. An additional, exhausting indignity on top of your already traumatic struggle to claw back to health. Surely we could do better? I mean, I know we could. Everyone else in the developed world somehow does. So why do we put up with it, is the better question!

Expand full comment
104 more comments...

No posts