I’ve touched on this subject before, but this time will be different. This post isn’t going to be about the senate, the house or the president. It won’t include anything about republicans and democrats. This post is going to be about hospitals and doctors.

Grab a cup of coffee. This is bound to end up being a long entry.

My grandfather is 83. He’s not your typical 83 yr old guy with all kinds of problems that prevent him from functioning. He mows his own lawn, plants his own garden, shovels snow off his own driveway.. is as vibrant and functional as any man would hope to be at his age.

Apparently, back in his 60’s he was told he had a bad heart valve and needed it replaced. He didn’t. Years rolled by and he kept telling his doctor, I’ve lived this long with it and I’m still here. Surgery is unnecessary.

I should also include here that like most men who were from the WW2 era. My grandfather smoked. He quit over 20 years ago, but he still did it for a long time. This caused him to have COPD as well.

Once he got up into his 80’s, he started having a harder time doing the things he enjoyed. He would even get winded walking out to the end of the driveway to get the paper or the mail. So he started seriously considering this heart valve operation. From what I am told, his cardiologist told him that having it replaced, would alleviate the breathing problems he was experience.

Now, I’m not a doctor, but if a guy smoked for 40 years and has emphysema, wouldn’t *that* logically be the cause of a man getting short winded? Seems like that makes way more sense than a leaky heart valve. But I digress..

My grandfather went to meet with a heart surgeon. A Dr. woods I believe his name was. He was an older gentleman who had been doing these types of surgeries for a long time. When he went to his office with my grandmother for the consultation, the doctor spent more time talking about his time in the Air Force than he did about the surgery. Having been in the service himself, My grandfather was a sea bee, he ate it up. He never asked the doctor any tough questions… like what is the negative outcome of a surgery like this and he left the surgeons office feeling confident that it would be a text book case.

It wasn’t.

In the beginning of december, he went in to the hospital and had a surgery that lasted 5 hours. We were told the surgery went well and all was good. He was supposed to be in the hospital for 10 days following the surgery so he could recover.

Then the problems began.

While recovering in the CICU, he was never allowed to get more than a few minutes rest before a nurse was coming in to prick something, get a sample of something, take a blood pressure, etc. He was unable to eat after his surgery and a feeding tube was inserted down his nose and into his stomach to give him nurishment.  He was scheduled for tests on a friday and they turned off the food. The test was never performed that day and wouldn’t be able to be performed until monday at the earliest, so logically you’d turn the guys food back on for the weekend, right? No. Apparently not.

My mother and grandmother asked over and over why he wasn’t being fed and were basically told it was no big deal. He can go days without food. Really? I’d like to see those nurses and doctors get major surgery and then not eat for 4 days. Wonder what their outcome would be.

I went up to see him on a wed. afternoon. He was weak and tired, but also managed to have a good 1/2 hr conversation with me. We’d talk a few minutes and he’d basically fall asleep and then wake up and start talking to me again. I told my mother and grandmother that he looked like a guy who needed 2 solid days of sleep and they agreed. However, he was never allowed that luxury. There were nurses and therapists in there constantly.

Eventually the feeding tube was removed and he was given the ok to eat solid food. This lead to a new round of problems. Somehow he aspirated. We aren’t sure if it was on food, some reflux after eating or it could have even just been his own saliva. This led to a case of aspirated pneumonia.

Suddenly he’s running a fever and he’s given antibiotics, etc. The next thing we know, he’s crashing. His breathing was so labored, his heart went into distress. The doctors and nurses worked on him for hours, put him on a ventilator, a ton of different drugs and moved him upstairs to the ICU.

He spent several days up there, getting bags of blood, fresh frozen plasma and tons of medicine. All we kept hearing was how sick he was.  How tired he was. How he was in a weakened state. Well, no duh. You try getting open heart surgery and then getting next to no food or sleep for 2 weeks following and see how you do.

About a week or so went by and he started to show some improvement. My grandfather is a tough guy. He’s a fighter. They don’t make men like him anymore. It was determined that he would move to an on campus rehab called Altec. We had a lot of hope that he would get the care he needed down there and was now on the road to recovery. Boy were we wrong!

While down there, they did wean him off the ventilator, but the nurses would drag sheets on the floor and then cover my grandfather with them. When they came in to do things, like change his bed linen, they’d put them on top of the infectious disease garbage cans. It was a horror show down there of epic proportions. The nurses were supposed to be getting him out of bed twice a day so his lungs could drain and he’d get stronger, but they’d only do it once and when my grandmother complained and said a doctor had written an order for twice, they’d leave him in the chair for hours because “they didn’t have time to get him out of bed twice a day”.

He also managed to catch MRSA down there. I wonder if that has anything to do with the way they put things on top of garbage cans, and then on top of him.

Then one day they had him in the chair before my grandmother got there and he fell out of the chair, onto the hard floor.  No tests were ever performed to see if he hurt anything. If he’d hit his head. He sat in bed the whole day looking like a scared rabbit and then that very night, he crashed again.

Hours and hours of work by multiple doctors and now he’s back up in CICU with a ventilator, tubes, a temporary pace maker and a huge step backwards.

For the record, I should state that he’s now been in the hospital for over 1 month. A far cry from 10 days.

I took my grandmother to the hospital that night. We met with some PA’s who advised my grandmother that her husband was a mess and that he was looking at “no meaningful recovery” as an outcome. Which basically meant he might recover, might get off the ventilator again, might be able to eat and stand, but would be doing it in a nursing home. He’d never go home and mow the lawn again.

My grandmother and I talked for a long time. About how that’s not the life he wanted. How if he wasn’t coming out of this hospital healthy and able to do for himself, he wouldn’t want to live. He even had a living will that said the same things.

She began to come to terms with what needed to be done. That the right choice was to make him comfortable and help him on his way to heaven. Then we ran into Dr. Woods in the hallway.

He starts telling my grandmother not to give up hope now! That he’d said my grandfather would most likely need a pace maker and that he could still recover from all this. So the hours we spent discussing her options, the time it took to help her be ok with the decision she needed to make, went right out the window.

I was MAD and I was rather short with Dr. Woods. I told him that we were told there would be no meaningful recovery. That the man was a mess and he wasn’t even able to move his bowels. When they did an x-ray to see if the feeding tube was in a good position, you could see the stool in his intestines, that’s how much waste he had built up in his system. I calmly, but firmly let him have it.

He looked at me as if no one had ever spoken to him like that and sprinted back to the cicu to “assess” my grandfather.  My grandmother is in her 80’s. She doesn’t move as fast as she did in her younger years. She gets around fine, just a little slower. So by the time we got to the room, he was already leaving. He was in there no more than 2-3 minutes “assessing”.

He started grilling me for information. Who told my grandmother there was no hope? I said it was a PA named John Smith and my grandfathers “pet pa” I forget her name now. Andrea I think. He flies into a rage about how they had no right to tell my grandmother it was the end, that she shouldn’t give up hope now and then he left. He never said why we shouldn’t give up hope. Just that we shouldn’t.

My take on it was he wanted to be able to bill him for the pace maker he insisted he would need since right after the surgery was performed.

My grandfather spent the next 2 weeks in CICU, being poked, prodded, tested, tubed.. you name it, he had it done.

They successfully weaned him off the ventilator again and he spent 8 days unvented and was even talking to my grandmother. Even though at that point, she knew he’d never be able to come home, she became hopeful again that she at least wouldn’t lose him completely. It’s tough when you spend 63 years with someone, to let them go. Now it was just a waiting game of hoping he got strong enough to at least go into an assisted living facility.

He was doing really well those 8 days. We were all shocked at how well.

Then on thursday they turned off his feeding again. They made him lie flat all day, not something recommended for someone still getting over pneumonia, because they wanted to do a cat scan of his abdomen. The hours rolled by and it was determined that they wouldn’t be able to fit him in that day, they’d do it the next day. My grandmother asked if they would turn his feeding back on and she was told no. That after the test in the morning they’d do it.

That night, he crashed again.

Even though by that point, my grandmother had a Do Not Recusitate order, they put him back on the ventilator, more tubes and wires and kept him going.

The whole family rushed up to the hospital because we figured this would be the day we’d pump him full of drugs, make him comfortable and turn off the machines. But that didn’t happen.

You’d think after everything he’d been through, he’d just be laying there, unresponsive, but he wasn’t. He woke up, communicated with us the best he could with a ventilator down his throat and indicated that he didn’t want to die. Who would if they were asked that question?

So even though he’s looking at spending the rest of his life hooked up to machines, needing constant nursing care, etc. That’s what he wants now. My grandmother was livid that the doctor put him back on the ventilator even though she’d told them not to, to just let him pass if his time came. The doctor claimed the computer told him that it was ok. That everything else said no, but the ventilator still said yes.

At one point in the day, my father was speaking privately with the nurse that was caring for my grandfather that day. He asked her why they do these kinds of surgeries on people who are 83 years old. After all, a lot of us don’t even make it that long to begin with. Why put an 83 yr old man through all this torture?

Her answer may surprise you. She said it was because it was just another pay day. That if the surgery goes well, the doctor is a hero. If it goes bad, oh well. On to the next one. The doctor makes a ton of cash, the hospital makes a ton of cash… and everyone is happy. Except for the poor guy they end up torturing and ultimately killing.

I can only imagine what all this is costing. After close to 2 months bouncing between CICU, then ICU then Altec, then back to CICU, it’s got to be bordering on a million dollars.  One nurse told my grandmother it’s $3500 a day just to be in the CICU. That doesn’t include the daily xrays, the medicine, the tubes, the vent, the on and on and on they have been doing to him. And for what? Certainly not so he can ever go home again and live his life. To see the sun and hear the birds.

It’s so they can bill his medicare and aarp insurance for tests, procedures, medicines, doctors and a ton of other things that are totally unnecessary to do to an 83 yr old guy in his condition.

Before we can fix insurance, before we can get everyone to see a doctor when they are sick, we need to fix the healthcare system itself. Somewhere along the line, compassion was taken out of the equation and now it’s all about money. How much can I charge you for all this? I don’t care if you die, just so long as the check clears.

And don’t fool yourself here. If you’re a tax payer, YOU are footing the bill for this. This is all going to be paid for through YOUR tax dollars. Medicare is paying for it all and the “donut hole” insurance picks up the rest.

So for all the nonsense I hear about government getting between you and your doctor. Someone obviously has to.  Not to deny you life saving surgery, but to tell doctors and nurses and hospitals that they need to put systems in place where you aren’t going to make your patients sicker than when they came in, just to squeeze every last cent out of their insurance.

What happened to my grandfather is a sin… and I hope Doctor Woods enjoys his vacation this year knowing that because he never discussed the down side with my grandfather and spent the whole time talking about being in the service, that he didn’t prepare him for what could have and ultimately did end up happening. In the end he’s going to end up dead… or worse.. he’s going to wish he was, but unable to die due to the machines they have him attached to and don’t seem to want to unhook. Because even with a DNR order, they did it anyway.

All I can hope for is that some day, Dr. Woods is in my grandfathers position. That he’s given incompetent care and has a tube in every hole of his body. I hope when his wife is told it’s the end, some asshole just like him shows up and tells her not to do it, to keep him going another few weeks so they can milk his insurance. That would be the ultimate justice. I guess for now, I can only hope he meets the same end as my grandfather.