Health

An American blogger in London gets ill, is struck with amazement at how people in civilised countries deal with healthcare:

My name was called after just a couple of minutes in the waiting room. An Asian doctor with a gentle, inquisitive face and a soothing, avuncular manner took my medical history, asked me if I was allergic to any medication, and examined my eyes. The diagnosis was indeed conjunctivitis. The doctor wrote out a prescription for antibiotic eye drops with steroids that would take care of both the infection and the discomfort, and pointed to a pharmacy directly across the street where I could fill it. Did I have any further questions?

Only one: Where could I get the forms and receipts that I would need to file with my insurance company back home? ”The eyedrops will cost you about ten pounds,” the doctor replied, “but there’s no cost for this examination.” When I gazed at him with disbelief, he added, as if patiently explaining something elemental to a child, “This is the National Health Service — it’s free.”

Not pointed out in the article or noted by any of the commenters is that this poor guy first spent half the night getting permission from his own insurer to get medical help in London, having to call a dollar a minute helpline on his mobile from abroad (so ghu knows how much it all cost him), just because he’s so used to being fucked over by insurance, when all this time none of this was necessary…

Do read the comments, as though there is some pushback from people convinced socialist medicine can’t be any good, there’s also the explanation of an elected governor of an NHS hospital about how “free at the point of access” is worked out behind the scenes. One of the clearer, more concise explanations I’ve read about how the NHS assigns costs to its various components…

If you’re a longtime reader of this blog and still bothering to keep up with us though it is more or less moribund, you may have wondered where Palau has been this past year. Perhaps you’ve also wandered over to Wis[s]e Words and read my posts there about what’s been going on, but I’ve never really explained here what’s been happening. To keep a long story short, Palau always had had problems with her kidneys, due to a bout with cancer years ago, but had managed to keep them functioning on a high enough level not to need dialysis. Last year this was no longer possible and she had to go to dialysis treatment three times a week. We had already decided that if necessary and possible I would donate a kidney to her (having two of them it is actually possible to do this as a live donor). At the time we thought we had to wait for a kidney swap, me donating it to somebody else and their donor giving their kidney to Palau, but luckily we turned out to be compatible and didn’t need to wait for anybody else. It took roughly a year of tests and exercise on my part to get my weight down to get ready, but in December last year, five days before Christmas, we had the operation. For my side of the process, I can’t do much better than the comic cartoonist Jana Christy did about her donation.

Unfortunately in our case the aftermath didn’t go so well. Again, I won’t bore you with everything we went through but Palau has been in and out of hospital ever since, suffering from side effects of the anti-rejection drugs, various opportunistic infections and so on. The last time she was home was in June and she’s been in hospital again since early July (heck, we even got married in hospital). It’s getting her down, especially with her birthday coming up this Wednesday. If y’all would like to do something to cheer her up, why not send a card to:

Palau
Room 18 Ward 4B
VU Medisch Centrum
De Boelelaan 1117
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands

The hospital has been great on the medical side of things, but Palau is missing some of the camaraderie of an English hospital and would be cheered up no end by a nice card from a blog reader. As for myself, I try and keep this blog more uptodate than I have been doing.