When I started writing again, I promised myself that I would work hard at being upbeat. So earlier this month, I published what I thought was a cute article on my eating disorder which I called the “F It” diet. The next day I found myself on the floor looking up at Renee’s face. I had no recollection of what happened. Apparently, I had been in the refrigerator, left the door open and collapsed on the floor either banging my head knocking myself out or passing out falling to the floor and banging my head. Regardless of what the mechanism was, I spent the next 24 hours in the hospital under observation. Luckily, the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong other than a broken right index finger and some contusions to the scalp on the left.
Unfortunately, I am thoroughly right-handed and find it very difficult to function without my right hand as my finger is in a soft cast. So today marks the first day of learning a new program which allows me to convert speech to text. Please forgive me if you find grammatical errors or misplaced words like the Umm at the beginning of this sentence um as I’m getting used to um the new program.
The real topic for today is how much I dislike being the patient. The transition from doctor to patient has been difficult. The hospital I was taken to by the paramedics is a new hospital owned by Atrium Healthcare and was quite impressive. The nursing staff was attentive, the ER doctors were sharp, and the hospitalists had a good bedside manner and excellent background in medicine. Advocate health care has just merged with Atrium. I hope they don’t ruin Atrium!
The major problem with the current delivery of medicine is that the specialists have become so specialized that the finger specialists cannot take care of the hip, the hip specialists cannot take care of the back, and the back specialist cannot take care of the knees leaving me with a specialist for every bone in the body. I miss the days when your primary doctor could take care of almost everything that bothered you. Nowadays, it seems the primary doctors are referral agencies, and I was referred to a neurologist, a cardiologist an orthopedist and a Parkinson’s specialist. What a pity!
To make a long story short, my Parkinson’s is worse and functioning without my right hand makes life even more difficult. Thank God for the bidet! I read an interesting article today that projected that Amazon was going to become a major player in the healthcare industry and was currently looking to buy physician practices. I’m not quite sure how their model will work for medicine; but, if it works as well as it does for buying commodities, it should be interesting. At least you’ll be able to buy a bidet at the same place that you get your COVID test.
I want to wish you all happy holidays and a healthy and happy new year. With the start of the new year, I plan on working on a new book, “Humor in Medicine.”
When my patient was miserable with the flu and brought to the office by their spouse, I would look at the spouse and say, “I told you to give him all of the poison at once, otherwise he would suffer even more.” Even the sickest of patients would laugh, making them feel better if only for a minute. On one occasion, the wife’s reaction was undeniable. Her facial expression was clearly,” How do you know?” Yep, she WAS poisoning him and a little joke went a long way to healing him.
Feel better. Glad it was only a finger.