Sunday, December 24, 2006

You call this medical treatment???

My wife's grandpa, over 80, got hospitalized a couple of weeks ago due to hyponatremia. As this problem implies, it was probably a result of various other illnesses he has been suffering from lately. While at the hospital, he catched pneumonia and above all he got a very violent bacteria, which reached his heart and even harmed his artificial pacemaker. The only way to save his is surgery, to remove the pacemaker, but his condition is so bad that they're currently trying to figure out how to do it, and in any case the chances of success are very slim.
Had he stayed at home, eaten better and drink a lot, he'd probably had gotten rid of the problem in a few days.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, happened in one of Israel's finest hospitals (Rambam).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rambam may be one of the finest hospitals, but it still basically sucks. Like most Israeli hospitals, it's completely packed, overflowing with patients and impatient staff members (can't say I blame them - I would be impatient too if I had to tackle such a workload with low pay and crappy conditions).

The only hospital I've been to that didn't strike me as utterly horrible was Nahariya, and even that's just from short external observation.

Bottom line: stay out of hospitals.

Ilan Assayag said...

I couldn't agree more. Having two little girls, we have already been in the dillemma whether or not to go to the hospital several times. We always try to avoid it, but in most cases you really know only on hindsight, when it's already too late.
I had myself a very bad experience with that. Was sent to the hospital by my doctor due to headaches that didn't pass for a whole week. After they ran out of ideas, they did me a Lumbar Puncture, to rule out meningitis. The test came out negative, but I suffered from the test itself - got such strong headaches that it made me vomit. I couldn't get my head up (i.e. had to eat/drink/live horizontally) for 2 weeks, and needed additional 3 weeks to get completely well. This is called Post-LP Headache, and 5% of the people who go through Lumbar Puncture have that. It had to be me.
3 weeks after I got home from the hospital I got a letter with the results of some of the blood tests - I just had some kind of virus, nothing really serious...
Once again, had I remained at home, I would probably have suffered from the headaches a few more days and that would have been it :-)