The Methodist Hospital: Fill & Download for Free

Not American, and I made the move the other way around (London to NYC) but I still think I qualify to answer.I have used other answers to explain how underdeveloped, positively Third World if you excuse the expression, I find the American healthcare system.In today’s anecdote, I was at the Methodist hospital in Brooklyn, AD 2012. I had cut a finger while clumsily opening an Amazon package. Not life-threatening but it needed stitches (two stitches as it turned out). Usual pile of paperwork and insurance checking before being seen, etc.While I am there filling in paperwork, a construction worker walks in. He profusely bleeds from the temple (he is still wearing his hard cap) and holds a towel to it, soaking blood. He clearly had had a concussion and, in any other country I know, would have been seen immediately.The lady at the counter hands him the pile of paperwork and asks to check his insurance.The man is there, trying to fill in forms with one hand while staunching the wound with the other, dripping blood.I loved many things about living in the US. I hated many. This episode made me furious. It still does. What a morally bankrupt place it is, where a human being is treated this way.FYI, my two stitches cost $400.

Right now I am feeling grateful and overwhelmed by the outpouring of concern.I was right back to 100% once the hospital released me. The good thing about being laid low by outgassing is that once they cleared the gas out of me, I bounced back really fast. But man, did I ever have some entertaining hallucinations.Big shout-out to Judy Chambers, Charles Borner, and especially my guardian angel Bill Fawcett for getting me through the whole thing, including Bill going through every card in my wallet and finding my Medicare and Blue Cross supplement insurance cards. Another big shout out to the ER staff and 8th Floor Tower B nursing staff of IU Methodist Hospital for AMAZING care. Seriously, they set a standard to envy.

This didn’t happen to me. But it is a great story which happens to be true.Dr. DeBakey was a pioneer in heart surgery. He invented several revolutionary surgeries. One of these was a way to repair a thoracic aortic aneurysm. It became known as the DeBakey procedure.When he was 97 Dr. DeBakey suffered an aortic dissection. Having invented the procedure he knew the risks and recovery involved and said he did not want the procedure.However, his surgical colleagues could not take no for an answer and as soon as he was unconscious they convinced his next of kin to consent to the surgery.Well now we get back to your question. The anesthesiologists for the hospital were around for all of this drama. To their everlasting credit, they refused to anesthetize him as they knew he had said he did not want the surgery. He was the most informed patient in the history of surgery.So they called the hospital’s ethics comittee together and they felt it was ethical to proceed. The hospital then gave emergency privileges to an anesthesiologist from a different hospital to anesthetize him for surgery.Houston Methodist hospital should be ashamed of this breach of medical ethics. Hopefully someday the anesthesiologists who did their best to honor a patient’s wishes will be given some credit for their very difficult decision.So what happened? After a 7-hour surgery, multiple complications and an 8-month stay, Dr. DeBakey was discharged and lived another year and a half.