I lost internet today at about 2:00. Very, very aggravating.
I am going to basically steal Howie Martin’s diary from Daily Kos here, because we all love SusanHu and she needs our help.
From time to time, those of us who are urgently and diligently working to “take our country back” are drawn to one of our own who needs our assistance. Susan Hu has been blogging on Kos, Booman Tribune and more recently on No Quarter for some years now, but her health issues call us to action today.
Susan can’t walk more than a few steps with a cane or walker. She can’t bend over. She can’t sweep, make her bed, or reach the bottom
shelves or drawer of her refrigerator. The slightest odd movement makes her scream in pain. She can barely lift her feet, and often
can’t go out because the two small steps down/up her back door are too scary, and she can’t go into the laundry room because of its small steps. Taking a shower is frightening. She can no longer drive more than two miles without intense knee and back pain. Riding in a car is also very painful. Sitting in the drive-through at the pharmacy is
agonizing. The intense burning pain in her thighs and knees gets worse when she lies down, and she can’t sleep more than an hour or two each day.
The local doctors told her it was her back (she does have significant lumbar damage). She complained to doctors for years about hip pain,
but they always said it was bursitis. They sent her to a neurosurgery unit, which kept examining her but couldn’t determine the problem.
Last spring, they advised she go to a rehabilitation medicine physician to get more flexible and stronger, and get an exercise program.
The rehab doctor watched her walk and within five minutes told her it was her hips, not her back, he suspected. The x-rays he ordered showed
that both hips are “shot” — there is no cartilage and the bone has disintegrated and presses against her femur bone, creating bone-on-bone pain. That doctor is now her hero for looking at her with “fresh eyes.” The rehabilitation doctor recommended against any pre-surgery exercise program because her condition is too delicate.
(The orthopedic surgeon concurred.) She does lift weights to keep her arms strong.
It took two months to see the orthopedic surgeon who told her that her situation is complex, and that she needs significant repair of both her back and her hips. He puzzled about which to tackle first. He decided on replacing both of her hips with implants. Then he’ll tackle her lumbar region. While she is in the hospital, she will receive radiation because, he told her that he could see a lot of bone spurs, which means her body tends to grow bone spurs. The radiation
will keep the cells, post-surgery, from creating new bone spurs near the implants. He said normal stay is 3 days but she’ll be in the
hospital for 7 days so that the rehabilitation doctor and physical
therapists can work with her. She will then go to an after-care facility.
Her bilateral hip replacement surgery is in three weeks but she just found out that she has significant dental cares and a couple infected teeth. She must be infection-free seven days before surgery because implants are at high risk for infection. Because she had no idea she needed so much work done, and had to wait for a dentist appointment, she didn’t have time to sign up for dental insurance. She is going to a dental school to have the work done, but it still will cost over
$2,000, and she has travel and living expenses. Her daughter lives nearby but in a three-story walk-up, so Susan has to stay in a motel.
She has a bit of savings, but it’ll be gone long before the dental work is completed.
Susan recently shared the following with me:
One thing I forgot to mention is that I’ve been declared disabled and can’t work since 2005 because of my back and other injuries but only recently got any health insurance and was paying for all care for two years before that. The new health insurance I’ll get in September will cover my surgery, but the premiums cost over $300 per month, with no dental coverage.
Susan Hu’s predicament is one of many caused by our nation’s failure to provide health care for its citizens. Because she is one of “our own” netroots family, I am asking you to contribute what you can today to support Susan Hu and help her come back to the front lines of the blogosphere and realize her dreams of renewed health and strength. If we can raise $4,000 to keep her afloat until she comes back, we will be doing a lot for this member of OUR community. We can do this for Susan Hu. Go here now, go to “Send Money” and enter Susan’s email address: susanunpc@gmail.com. Thank you.
Why is Susan bothering with conventional medicine? If I remember correctly, she lives in Washington, which has some of the most diverse and progressive health providers in the US. She should get to a naturopath, to a Chinese medicine specialist, to a homoeopath, to a rolfer, whatever, for real care. Of course these professionals cost money, but so does insurance, copays and pharmaceutics. Of course not every alternative medicine practitioner is a genius, but neither are every MD.
I sympathize with Susan’s plight to a point, I’m a health care provider myself, but damned if I’d leave my case in the hands of just physicians and the Western medical insurance system when “they” can’t seem to help her.
Let’s not cry too loudly there about her medical costs. My insurance costs me $700+ a month without dental. That’s life in the Big City, I accept that, but until we as a nation push out this crew of insurance companies, HMO’s, hopsital corporations and pharmaceuticals with National Health Care, we have to pay a price for our health. I’d go seek alternative medicine in a heartbeat, in fact, I’d start there, and only go to the Western docs as a last resort for surgery and imaging scans.
MY GOD, how lame are these doctors that it took over 2 years to figure out she’s got osteoarthritis in her hips? What kind of “qualified” are these people? Can we start a diary and thread about misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis? It would crash the Boo server!!!!
Get with it folks, if the system doesn’t work for you, go alternative!!!
Yeah. I’m no doctor but just a couple paragraphs in I wondered why they haven’t really looked at her hips. I don’t know how many older ladies I’ve known of who needed new hips either because they’ve fallen and broken them or they’ve just deteriorated so badly. It’s pretty common – and painful. And these jokers didn’t immediately suspect it from her symptoms? Even the most overworked “socialized medicine doctor” in Canada would immediately suspect the hips and get her into surgery for some new ones quickly.
There are an awful lot of doctors, at least in my experience, especially those white male types, that consider middle aged women whiners and complainers. I have been misdiagnosed, all but laughed at, certainly dismissed many, many times when I had health issues. In fact it took the geniuses more than 10 years to diagnose Graves disease for me. So, that she got someone to figure out in 2 years what it is, though sad and very distressing, it could have been worse.
7 years ago I threw all my meds away and went strictly for alternative healing and have amazingly good health. Never better in my life. You know when you go to the dentist they ask you about what meds you take and on my last visit a few months ago the dentist all but called me a liar when I told him I take nothing. I guess if you are my age most folks are taking about 15 – 20 different meds.
Within a month of getting off all my meds I felt a 100% better. Just my solution for me, but it has been a fabulous one.
Heartfelt good wishes to Susan, my thoughts and best wishes are with you.
Hugs
It’s not so much the white male types. It’s the American health care system allowing insurance companies unchecked power. The doctor gets paid pretty much the same whether he writes you a prescription, tells you to go away, or spends hours researching a difficult problem. They get punished if they don’t have enough bodies going through their office.
The system encourages specialists. They look at their one item of interest, and run the standard approved tests. If that doesn’t give them an easy answer, they tell you to try some other specialist, or that it must be in your head. No one teaches them system troubleshooting.
My ex-doctor told me that I had spent enough of the insurance company’s money and they couldn’t find anything. I was just going to have to live with unexplained symptoms.
What ‘alternative’ treatment are you proposing for the dental infection aspect of Susan’s situation and what financing or program are you proposing she use to pay for it?
I responded at dKos, but am very glad to see this here, Boo.
Susan’s the real deal – and one of the biggest Deadwood fans I’ve ever met. That counts for a lot.
i don’t have a lot, but done.
once brendancalling starts working again, i’ll post.
make sure you email susie madrak and the FDL folks about this. they all know from health problems and the kindness of fellow bloggers.
I hate it when that happens. 8 hours with no Internets? Aaaaahh!
And I’m sure people have been wondering “What happened to Booman?”
I too hope that Susan will go the alternate medicine route since I have absolutely no faith in our medical system. My recent brush with CTS left no doubt in my mind that the medical establishment is just a bunch of jaded profit centers. Since I ended up on Worker’s Comp it just made things worse since I actually have insurance through my husband that covers some alternative procedures such as chiropractic and acupuncture, but the insurance wouldn’t cover anything that related to the CTS because it was a work injury.
Some of you may remember my Worker’s Comp nightmare diaries and what I had to go through to get physical therapy since I was sure that with PT and exercise and nutritional support I could find healing and avoid surgery. I did a lot of research since little is really known about the causes of CTS and there’s a lot of controversy, but I was determined to avoid surgery since it would just be adding another injury to an injury that is not well understood in the first place.
Worker’s Comp sent me to an orthopedic surgeon who was furious when I wouldn’t sign up for surgery. He was very insulting and tried to browbeat me, but I had made up my mind and wouldn’t budge, so he finally relented and authorized the PT. After three months of PT and stretches and exercises along with intensive nutritional support, the PT started resolving and I am virtually symptom-free at this point (knock on wood!).
I also have a severe lower back injury that ended my dance career and lived in debilitating pain for a long time so my heart goes out to Susan. Many people tried to talk me into having surgery, but again I felt intuitively that I should go the alternate route. I started a gentle yoga routine about 10 years ago and gradually the pain subsided and, although my dancing days are done, at least I can enjoy a pain free normal existence (knock on wood again).
I worked at UCLA Medical Center for 15 years and raised a son with a serious disability so believe me I have been the rounds of our medical system and seen all sides of it and it is truly tragic. I know that Susan’s situation is very different than what I have gone through, but I fear for anyone who is in the hands of those greedy crackpots we call medical doctors. (Apologies to the good doctors among us, I know there are some!)
So my greatest wish for Susan is the same as Isis even though I know it’s hard when you have come to such an extremity to try to start down another path. At the same time each person has to follow their own intuition about what is best for them.
Hang in there, Susan, our thoughts and prayers are with you!
As someone who has his own serious health issues I want to offer my perspective on health care. Certainly I have some serious complaints about several aspects of the conventional Western medical approach to illness and difficulty, but I have to say that, in the case of many friends of mine who have serious illnesses and who are totally focused on so-called ‘alternative’ medicine, many of these friends are far sicker now than they were before as they too are being exploited by hacks and quacks every bit as ignorant and foolish and greedy as those in the western med tradition who are typically accused of such behavior and failings. And their bank accounts and life savings have likewise been looted by these quacks at no slower a pace than that of our profit based Western medical system.
In light of this I’d like to make one point I think is important. It’s that neither “Western Med’ nor ‘Alternative Med’ are monolithic. Each can provide real benefits as well as real damage, but it seems foolish to automatically demonize one discipline in order to enhance the appeal of the other. IMHO, it is almost always the case that a combination of benefits can be derived from both arenas and that this frequently leads to the best results.
In my own case for instance, I had a fatal heart attack back in 2004 and was in the hospital for over 3 months, dying and being resurrected several more times while there. Now I have a pacemaker/defibrillator and take 8 medications every day. In the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma here in Florida in 2005 I was not able to renew my prescriptions for over two weeks because the drugstores were closed due to lack of power. So what happened? My heart was going into sudden death ventricular arrhythmia every day, and I would have died several times over without that nifty defibrillator device implanted in my chest. And once I was able to get back on the medications everything calmed down. But, I would be dead many times over were it not for that clever machinery, and so I’m thankful for the Western medical knowhow that invented the thing. As to my drugs, while I never really liked the idea of being dependent on pharmaceuticals, and while I am being very responsible these days as to diet and exercise and breathing exercises and yoga and all sorts of common sense things like that, there is as yet no demonstrated ‘alternative medicine’ remedy for the serious propensity of hearts as severely damaged as mine to go into this fatal form of arrhythmia. There are various nutrients I am cognizant of that are supposed to mitigate such tendencies to a certain degree, but, by themselves, such nutrients are not sufficient to prevent me from dying from an arrhythmia, and so I take my medications, in combination with all the other conscious health oriented things I now do.
Recently I had a letter printed in the NYT that speaks to this very issue, (reprinted below).
So, I would urge all to have some sort of results-based approach to health care. Don’t stay with Western med people who aren’t providing benefit, but don’t stay with the alternative med folks who similarly fail to deliver measurable benefits. Vilifying one group or the other in toto, however, can be quite counter-productive, like cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.
I don’t dispute the very real truth that the leading cause of premature death in the US is from ‘medical mistakes’ in our health care system. But it is also true that there are many people on the receiving end of ‘alternative medicine’ hucksters whose health issues are being made worse if only by virtue of spending vast amounts of time pursuing courses of ‘treatment’ that accomplish nothing except to basically divert that patient from seeking more effective treatment for their problems sooner.
To the NYT
To the Editor:
I had a near-fatal heart attack in 2004.
Fortunately, the E.M.S. rescue team in Deerfield Beach, Fla., got to me within about 11 minutes and revived me, and the cardio team at Broward General Medical Center was able to do stenting quickly enough that, while my heart muscle was severely damaged, I am alive and functioning today.
I’m both pleased and proud to say that I take eight medications every day and that I intend to continue doing this until the actual end of my days.
The idea that I’d not want to do this because my ego has trouble accepting that I’m sick and need this sort of help has never occurred to me.
The very idea that illness carries some sort of social stigma, that we think less of ourselves because of it, and that we want to conceal our condition from others because of it is just foolishness.
Stephen Jones
Deerfield Beach, Fla., April 8, 2007
Thank you for a bit of reason.
A healthy lifestyle and natural remedies can provide many benefits, but modern medicine is also good for many problems. Encouraging a balanced diet is good, but don’t use it as a way of blaming the victim. Sometimes people just get sick.
My health problems are only debilitating, quality rather than quantity of life. My doctor has me taking 5 prescription meds, along with magnesium, salt, gatorade-type drinks, and exercise appropriate for my condition. I’m open to anything that keeps me functional, wherever it comes from.
I am moved by this but not as a confrontation to me or a diatribe against my willingness to open my heart and share my own personal experience. Why is this a reply to me? Why not just an expression of your own convictions in the context of Susan’s suffering?
“Thank you for a bit of reason.” writes hens teeth. Clearly the implication is that I am unreasonable.
Got it.
Mythmother, my remarks are in no way intended to be confrontational or a diatribe against anything you have said, and I’m very sorry if it came across that way to you. As to the fact that my post was a ‘reply’, to yours, this was mainly because your post seemed to advocate relying solely on ‘alternative medicine’, as did Isis’ post above, and the point I wanted to make was central to that issue and I’d already replied to the previous post by Isis.
It happens that I don’t agree with you that
While in my experience this is true to a large extent it is not universally true, it is not true in every instance. And, as I thought I said in my post, there is plenty of fraud and hackery in the ‘alternative medicine’ arena as well, and the point I was making is that one is not all good and the other all bad. And you may take care to note that I did not single out this specific disagreement I had with your post, which I surely would have done had I intended to be confrontational or if I was just diatribing.
From the time I came of age in the early ’60s I’ve been aware of the hypocrisy and greed and the fact that the medical industry in this country and elsewhere is in large part a huge profit-making scam. But, even so, some of the stuff works and there are plenty of dedicated, principled, and yes, learned people who work in that field. Similarly, I’ve been aware of nutritional and herbal remedies and stuff combined with physical disciplines and such as ways to improve and maintain good health since long before it was fashionable in our society, so I have a pretty good grounding and appreciation for the primary philosophies at the heart of much of the ‘alternative medicine” industry. But it is absolutely indisputable that, like in western medicine the hacks outnumber the ‘responsible’ practitioners, there are plenty of swindlers and crooks in that industry too and many of them have a much easier time getting away with their bulshit.
I don’t see that pointing this out represents any confrontational posture at all, and I’m sorry you take my previous words that way.
I appreciate the apology and explanation.
You say:
So please remember that I also said this:
I don’t mean to be touchy, but I let the whole day go by and it still rankled with me that your comment was “aimed” at my comment and then another chimed with the implication that I’m not rational.
It’s not the first time I’ve opened up my heart to this “community” and received a slap in the face in return, although I’m very glad to hear that you didn’t mean it that way. Thank you.
I’m sorry that came out so strongly. I’ve heard so much blame the patient in the past, that I can be a little oversensitive and read more than there is into a comment.
I wanted to use my own experiences to point out that all sources of health care have their uses, and failings, and we shouldn’t exclusively rely on one method or another.
Apology accepted and I have to apologize in my turn if anything I said could even remotely be construed as “blaming the patient.” This would never even occur to me.
I put all the blame squarely on our tragically compromised medical system, and wanted to let Susan and others know that alternative medicine has worked well for me and that there are alternatives out there for those who have the means and the inclination to pursue them.
On the other hand, I added the disclaimer that everyone has to follow their own intuition. I am not a qualified medical practitioner and therefore not qualified to give medical advice.
However, to illustrate my point, I decided to look up a quote that I remember from the Los Angeles Times a long time ago (I think you might need a ProQuest account to access the link).
I highlight the part of the quote that has been burned in my mind for 16 years because it’s just about the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard anyone say. Bear in mind that I worked at UCLA Medical Center at the time and that I saw many children die horribly of cancer up-close-and-personal while my son was a patient, and over the years that I worked there. I have also lost quite a few close friends to this dread disease, not to mention the fact that I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and went through surgery and radiation therapy myself in 1985.
Claire Speigel
April 29, 1991
“Cancer is big business. It’s a huge and growing field,” said David Langness, spokesman for the Hospital Council of Southern California. As hospitals struggle to survive the financial ill effects of a rapidly changing health scene, government cuts, empty beds and growing competition for patients, hospital administrators are eager to capture a piece of the lucrative cancer market.
(My emphasis.)
Yes it was a long time ago, but have things gotten better? I don’t think so.
Do capitalism and medicine mix? Not so as you’d notice.
True this quote relates to an underlying attitude vs. actual statistics on medical incompetence and malpractice. But to my mind the one leads directly to the other.
Thanks Booman, for your response to the “call.”