I've got to get out of here. Home it is, and the sooner the better. Whatever brought on this condition is not showing up by my staying here, and I can take my own blood pressure if need be. I’ve already read every available magazine and book on the property. The hospital routine is memorized, the coffee is weak but the meals are surprisingly good when you can get one.
Later, I was finally discharged just before noon, I promised Julie in HR not to drive back to my car on the freeway. I am fine and drove after that both to get my huge prescription filled and to Quizno’s to let the Alaine know I cannot make Christmas dinner this year. When I say fine I don't mean perfect because you still experience a complete drain of energy. Until something like this happens a lot of us don't realize there is a certain core of core energy that you take for granted.
It becomes exhausting even drive the car so really I be no company. This prescription shows they aren’t sure about anything. It’s five different pills to cover all the angles. It won’t be ready until tomorrow, and my rule of thumb says $1.00 per pill. Let’s see how close I figure. I also had to cancel with Jesse and the café staff, just looking at his younger sisters could have given me a heart attack. That's a joke, son.
[Authors note: toward the end at Mount Sinai, I was getting quite disillusioned by some of the things they were doing. If some activity didn't produce an immediate profit of some kind they would cut back on it even if it meant overall effectiveness was compromised. You could tell they had learned to get away with this by making sure it was always some small thing that could be trivialized, but I'm referring to the situation when you add all those small things together.]
Something I must mention is the workings at Mt. Sinai after three entire days to observe. My gut instinct tells me some efficiency expert went through there and reduced everything to a ‘profit center’. Unfortunately, these experts forget that certain things have to mesh together. Example, I had to call someone over to ask, why after 72 hours, I still had the IV from Hialeah Hospital in my right arm. They quickly removed it, but that’s my point – now that I’m in Mt. Sinai who is watching out for these things? Answer: nobody because Mt. Sinai doesn’t make any profit on removing old IVs. But what if I had not known to ask? These things can cause infection.
Mt. Sinai is definitely not a retirement home. The atmosphere is that everything has been trimmed down to the tenth of a cent no matter what. The most despicable thing in my eyes was that the staff baits the patients. Not the doctors, most of them are okay, but pretty much everyone else on staff does, and the more helpless the patient the worse they do it.
Every conversation with the staff turns into a frustrating twenty-minute meeting session, where they try to get the patient angry so they can justify walking away. I know it sounds cruel but the fact of the matter is I witnessed this procedure dozens of times every day.
The worst instance was the poor lady across the hall, for it was clear it she was in some kind of pain in pain all the time. She plainly required some major painkillers that she was not getting. She would continually cry out in pain but when it subsided a bit she would reach for that buzzer thingee. From that point it would go something like this:
Patient rings for nurse
Nurse: “What?”
P: “Call me a doctor!”
N: “If you want a doctor, why did you call for a nurse?”
P: “Because I don’t have a button for a doctor!”
N: “Which doctor do you want?”
P: “It doesn’t matter, any doctor!”
N: “Well, if you are not going to cooperate, how am I supposed….”
This went on day after day with that poor woman, there was no way she could win. Ritual torture. The staff took turns getting her angry enough to shout so they could stomp away ‘insulted’, and of course without doing any work. It was like being in a government office. Yet nobody would dare say anything, because what might happen when you needed that nurse? Years later, the memory of that woman's pain still a chilling thought.
