Massachusetts General Hospital
Jun. 8th, 2007 02:10 pmThe last 36 hours or so have been some of the most stressful of my life, and that includes the weekend when I had to stay in London. Thursday was the day that Whitney got her teeth fixed, something that we'd been waiting for ever since Boxing Day when they decided to start growing into each other.
The first two insults came when the hospital phoned Whitney during Wednesday lunchtime to say that they wanted us to be there at 8:45 in the morning, and that we would be paying upwards of $3,000 for the surgery. This is apparently normal for students living in America under the least effective healthcare I've ever experienced. So even before we arrived, that doubled the number of painful extractions that were going to be performed that day. Turning around from the entrance to the Farmer's Market, I didn't even pause to finish my lunchtime burrito before taking the train home.
I couldn't sleep that night at all. I don't tend to have nightmares when I'm stressed, but instead my thought patterns get confused with what I've been doing earlier that day - and more often than not, I've been writing code. This means that two nights ago I had constant thoughts about having to instantiate the hopsital and plan how to implement its various departments and offices. After going to bed early, I woke up at ten, eleven, and two in the morning, trying to convince myself that all we had to do was get in a taxi and get to the hospital when we woke up.
And that task is difficult enough - to make absolutely certain that I would be all right for the journey, I rose out of bed at five o'clock. This isn't a wimpish aversion to early morning starts - I genuinely have to have a couple of hours in the morning before moving from the safety of where I live, or the result is usually like something out of the Exorcist. (Remember when everyone thought I was pregnant in first year of university? It's much the same as that.) At eight o'clock I decided that I didn't want to deal with the subway, and phoned for a taxi for both of us. A $20 fare on top of the riches the hospital was expecting us to pay wouldn't make a huge difference.
So after an uneasy taxi ride, we arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is an Escheresque set of very disparate buildings jammed together at random angles. But I'll say this for it - the lifts are impressive. Virtually as soon as you step in to them - "What floor would you li-" ZOOM "There you are". At the medical centre I work above, the lifts are so slow that anyone entering them while ill would probably be dead by the time that they arrived on an adjacent floor. In these, I'm surprised that we didn't momentarily become weightless.
When you go to hospital in America the first thing they do is hand you a heap of forms to fill in, to establish whether you're at risk from allergies or anything in your family history. Whitney got quite a full form out of this, as her extended family are some of the most resilient people in the world and they've together managed to amass just about the whole collection of disorders while staying alive regardless. The most interesting bit that I found on the form was a pain-o-meter of sorts, where the patient had to rate their level of agony on a scale from one to ten - from "Listening to a 9am Functional Analysis lecture" to "Dinner with Timmy Mallett". I can't imagine what possible use they could have for that for people that they're going to operate on anyway.
Much sooner than the original 10am appointment time, we were called through to what looked like a storage cupboard and sat down in very fake leather armchairs. Whitney was connected to an IV device, which she did very well with even though she's scared of needles, and we watched an ECG machine beep to itself at random as we waited for something else to happen. The nurse came through and asked about her name, age and what she was here for, which was mildly frightening as it's the kind of thing that you would think they should know already.
After what seemed an extraordinarily long time, during which half the staff came through and took gowns out of the shelving unit behind us, I watched Whitney being taken through into the operating room. I then walked back to the front area to wait, and for that hour, I was terrified. I had meant to ask how long the procedure was meant to take so that I had some idea of the time I would have to distract myself for, but I just had to keep going on Earthbound on my laptop, not knowing whether I could expect to wait another thirty minutes or that having to wait an hour signalled that something was wrong already. At the same moment my battery ran out, my name was called again and was shown through to Whitney, fast asleep on one of the leather chairs with a set of cooling bags around her jaws.
The nurse handed me a set of instructions and guidelines about what we would experience in the next few hours and what medication Whitney needed for her newly shaped jaw, then I was asked about contact details for a telephone follow-up on Monday. At this moment, Whitney sat upright, said very clearly that I had said our two phone numbers the wrong way around, then instantly fell asleep again. There's no escaping it. Over the next while she gradually came round, and after waiting for the doctor, who said how nice Whitney's jaw had been, we wandered out to the main entrance again, caught a taxi from the stop on the pavement outside and finally went home.
After getting back to the flat, we laid Whitney out on the sofa and I ventured forth to get her prescriptions from the local CVS pharmacy. (No, I can't look at that name without thinking that either.) Except they didn't have the all-important painkillers, so I had to phone the increasingly agonized Whitney and explain that I was trekking throughout the pharmacies to find them. Eventually the Walgreens along the road had them, and at the very reasonable price of $65, too - I was expecting to pay hundreds for them, the same as the painkillers that she had to take a few months ago. Now she should be asleep on the sofa, her mouth gradually forming into the right shape again. Hello if you're reading.
I've somehow managed to come up with a decent entry out of this, but this doesn't reflect at all how I felt at the time. The whole experience was almost as torturous and life-draining as the Visa process from start to finish. A word of advice - never get ill in America.
(By the way, for the benefit of
bonappetite as she's started some sort of linguistic counterterrorism initiative: Elevator; MGH; EKG; T; rank; sidewalk.)
The first two insults came when the hospital phoned Whitney during Wednesday lunchtime to say that they wanted us to be there at 8:45 in the morning, and that we would be paying upwards of $3,000 for the surgery. This is apparently normal for students living in America under the least effective healthcare I've ever experienced. So even before we arrived, that doubled the number of painful extractions that were going to be performed that day. Turning around from the entrance to the Farmer's Market, I didn't even pause to finish my lunchtime burrito before taking the train home.
I couldn't sleep that night at all. I don't tend to have nightmares when I'm stressed, but instead my thought patterns get confused with what I've been doing earlier that day - and more often than not, I've been writing code. This means that two nights ago I had constant thoughts about having to instantiate the hopsital and plan how to implement its various departments and offices. After going to bed early, I woke up at ten, eleven, and two in the morning, trying to convince myself that all we had to do was get in a taxi and get to the hospital when we woke up.
And that task is difficult enough - to make absolutely certain that I would be all right for the journey, I rose out of bed at five o'clock. This isn't a wimpish aversion to early morning starts - I genuinely have to have a couple of hours in the morning before moving from the safety of where I live, or the result is usually like something out of the Exorcist. (Remember when everyone thought I was pregnant in first year of university? It's much the same as that.) At eight o'clock I decided that I didn't want to deal with the subway, and phoned for a taxi for both of us. A $20 fare on top of the riches the hospital was expecting us to pay wouldn't make a huge difference.
So after an uneasy taxi ride, we arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is an Escheresque set of very disparate buildings jammed together at random angles. But I'll say this for it - the lifts are impressive. Virtually as soon as you step in to them - "What floor would you li-" ZOOM "There you are". At the medical centre I work above, the lifts are so slow that anyone entering them while ill would probably be dead by the time that they arrived on an adjacent floor. In these, I'm surprised that we didn't momentarily become weightless.
When you go to hospital in America the first thing they do is hand you a heap of forms to fill in, to establish whether you're at risk from allergies or anything in your family history. Whitney got quite a full form out of this, as her extended family are some of the most resilient people in the world and they've together managed to amass just about the whole collection of disorders while staying alive regardless. The most interesting bit that I found on the form was a pain-o-meter of sorts, where the patient had to rate their level of agony on a scale from one to ten - from "Listening to a 9am Functional Analysis lecture" to "Dinner with Timmy Mallett". I can't imagine what possible use they could have for that for people that they're going to operate on anyway.
Much sooner than the original 10am appointment time, we were called through to what looked like a storage cupboard and sat down in very fake leather armchairs. Whitney was connected to an IV device, which she did very well with even though she's scared of needles, and we watched an ECG machine beep to itself at random as we waited for something else to happen. The nurse came through and asked about her name, age and what she was here for, which was mildly frightening as it's the kind of thing that you would think they should know already.
After what seemed an extraordinarily long time, during which half the staff came through and took gowns out of the shelving unit behind us, I watched Whitney being taken through into the operating room. I then walked back to the front area to wait, and for that hour, I was terrified. I had meant to ask how long the procedure was meant to take so that I had some idea of the time I would have to distract myself for, but I just had to keep going on Earthbound on my laptop, not knowing whether I could expect to wait another thirty minutes or that having to wait an hour signalled that something was wrong already. At the same moment my battery ran out, my name was called again and was shown through to Whitney, fast asleep on one of the leather chairs with a set of cooling bags around her jaws.
The nurse handed me a set of instructions and guidelines about what we would experience in the next few hours and what medication Whitney needed for her newly shaped jaw, then I was asked about contact details for a telephone follow-up on Monday. At this moment, Whitney sat upright, said very clearly that I had said our two phone numbers the wrong way around, then instantly fell asleep again. There's no escaping it. Over the next while she gradually came round, and after waiting for the doctor, who said how nice Whitney's jaw had been, we wandered out to the main entrance again, caught a taxi from the stop on the pavement outside and finally went home.
After getting back to the flat, we laid Whitney out on the sofa and I ventured forth to get her prescriptions from the local CVS pharmacy. (No, I can't look at that name without thinking that either.) Except they didn't have the all-important painkillers, so I had to phone the increasingly agonized Whitney and explain that I was trekking throughout the pharmacies to find them. Eventually the Walgreens along the road had them, and at the very reasonable price of $65, too - I was expecting to pay hundreds for them, the same as the painkillers that she had to take a few months ago. Now she should be asleep on the sofa, her mouth gradually forming into the right shape again. Hello if you're reading.
I've somehow managed to come up with a decent entry out of this, but this doesn't reflect at all how I felt at the time. The whole experience was almost as torturous and life-draining as the Visa process from start to finish. A word of advice - never get ill in America.
(By the way, for the benefit of
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