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Tired of It All

I am tired and weary, and not in a mood to write. Friday morning, the elderly relative I had spoken about with the cancer scare suddenly had trouble breathing and I ended up rushing her to the emergency room. She had developed a rapidly advancing case of pneumonia. Because of her age and frailty, and because of the obnoxious nature of health care today, I have spent many multiple hours every day since (including 14 hours on that Friday while in the emergency room) to be her medical advocate and to talk with the numerous physicians who come in all day long each with a wildly different opinion or philosophy. Some physicians look at her with her labored breathing and advanced age and presume she is an invalid and treat her as a child, others have a clearer notion of her being elderly and frail, but when not ill with pneumonia she is able to perform normal day-to-day tasks and enjoy life. Still others feel it is valuable to alter her various hypertensive and/or cardiac medicines, likely taking them out of homeostaic normalcy instead of simply treating the pnemonia. It is frustrating as hell having to deal with physicans whose perspective is too narrow and looks only at the acute moment for the patient. We have a medication regeime that is excellent for her hypertension and heart when she is feeling well, so prior to any adjustments, it is imperative to have the infection cleared up AND THEN A PROPER evaluation of medication changes can occur. Every single time in the past when we have simply allowed the physicians to alter medications like this, there is inevitably trouble a week or two down the road where she responds poorly and they eventually bring her medications back to where they started.

I am not overly coherent at the moment so I shall end here for now.

Grumpy Old Man... I shall respond to Mr. Anonymous #2's rather rude and insensitive comments as soon as I can.

PipeTobacco