So this will be what I hope is a funny look at my day yesterday. A friend of mine said "I'm sorry you had to go through this". I didn't have to "go through" anything other than sitting on a chair for 7 hours listening to mom repeat herself and teaching myself how to plug and unplug all of the wires she was hooked up to. I actually learned a lot, self diagnosed a current issue I have, and concluded that it wouldn't matter what insurance I am paying through the nose for, it would suck equally. The whole industry is a freaking debacle.
When we were kids, my mom would do something goofy like put the iced tea in the cupboard, and she'd say "I think I've had a stroke."
- so she asked "what for" and they said "stroke" and she stuck out her tongue and said "Say a simple sentance" and put her hands over her head and said no thank you, can I not have the MRI i feel better. Mom spent most of our 7 hours repeating herself, and repeating the stroke test which only made me think she'd had a stroke. Except she kept passing the stroke test. She said she did it in the ambulance as well.Along the way she was walked down the halll several times, I had to take a nurse hostage to get her IV unplugged Mom hit her "call" button to no avail. I went into the empty hall which made no sense as every ER room had a patient in it, all elderly women with their husbands. I went to the nurse's station where there were at least 30 people, all clearly deeply immersed in working on charts or on phones dealing with insurance, or on computers, I had to wrench someone away to sheepishly ask if they could unplug mom's IV so she could pee. I had figured out how to unplug everything e baed on past bathroom adventures when nobody answers the call button. I'm not sure why they have it. at one point there were three call lights on in our little hall of four rooms. I almost went in to see what I could do, as nursess were working, doctor's were not present and two administrators just strolled past with their coffee.so she could use the bathroom, Kaiser sent in THEIR Doc because clearly the ER doc at Swedish is a 'tard, We didn't even see a doctor until 1pm. The PA was around-ish, we saw the nurse more than any one, and she was clearly overwhelmed.I learned how to unplug and plug everything back in so she could pee because nobody works at Swedish, she asked the same questions multiple times and told the same stories because her brain was fuzzy.
- Also, I started thinking maybe mom had a small stroke. She was definitely not firing on all cylinders, but I couldn't see what an MRI saying 'Yep, it was a stroke" could prove other than "Yep, it was a stroke". "Was" being the operative tense. Except she passed the repeated stroke tests by sticking out her tongue. Maybe a better test would be to give her a pitcher of iced tea and watch where she puts it.
- The nurse (who looked like a 60 year old Chelsea Handler and was my favorite) said they get all the "neurology" patients at Swedish because that's their strength. So that's cool, as long as you don't have Kaiser, apparently. According to my mom's neighbor, whose daughter is a nurse, Lutheran is known for "being terrible", and from personal experience I know St. Joe's is too small and they boot you out fast to get the bed.
FYI DO NOT GO TO ST ANTHONY'S NO MATTER WHAT YOUR INSURANCE IS IT WON'T MATTER. THEY FUNCTION AS IF THEY ARE A FOR PROFIT BUSINESS. DO NOT GO THERE!!
I would switch insurances if I thought the private option was any better. I used to have it, but switched when Jim was unemployed so he could be on my policy--Kaiser was less expensive than the other choice back then. which has its own issues with "In Network" docs only. I pay over $600 a month for shitty insurance, and I have only two options through school "Shitty Kaiser" or "Shitty Private". Thanks to Obama, I'm now paying even more for worse care.
For those who do not know, Kaiser was forced to take on new customers when Obamacare was passed. No FUNDING to help them handle it, they were just told: you have to do this now. Over night they were overwhelmed with seven thousand new patients they do not have the phone staff to handle or the doctors. They were forced to change their system to accommodate the volume without the money to hire more staff, so people like me who have been a customer for years can't get through at all. These are facts, guys, look them up. Don't yell at me for being Anti-Obama, just look up the facts. The Docs now spend a total of ten minutes with each patient. The Kaiser psychiatrist saw my daughter for fifteen minutes once every month and made psychological and medical and pharmacutical decisions based on those fifteen minutes. We had to pay an outside Pysc $150 an hour to untangle the mess the Kaiser Psych had made. Again, these are facts. And the psych we went to is outside all insurance systems because she was disgusted with them.
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