Problems with Raleigh Hospitals

[Catholic Sensation]

This is an entirely personal post, because I think it shows why we need more government help (though maybe one run by competent people, not assholes like Bush Inc.) with our health care system in America:

On Monday I went into Diabetic Keto-Acidosis (DKA) which is basically very high blood sugar and severe nausea combined with severe joint pain and dehydration. Since I go to college, I called up the local Student Healt Center and they hooked me up to an IV and gave me insulin every so often. Within a few hours my blood sugar returned to normal and my nausea and dehydration went away, but there were still a lot of keytones in my blood stream, so I "had" to be hospitalized.

Well I'm taken to a local hospital where I wait in the ER for seven hours while having about five minutes of work done on me. I am told I will have to stay overnight, but considering I was admitted at 7:30 pm and it was 2:30 by the time they told me this, it seemed like a foregone conclusion anyway. So they said that at 4:00 am they would take my blood (how they found any left in me after the amount they took during their five minutes of work is astounding) to see if I could get out at a reasonable time. The nurse came to take my blood at almost 7:00 am, which was kind of an annoyance, but my first class isn't till 11:30 in the morning so I wouldn't miss anything, so I thought... After they take my blood and give me my prison-esque proportioned breakfast, they say that at 7:30 they'll have my results and determine when I can go back to school. I don't hear a thing from them till 11:30, and that was only to tell me that they need to take more blood.

When I was told that I needed to give more blood I started to get visibly annoyed, and I am part Hungarian so visibly annoyed = totally pissed off. So I start asking the nurse what is going on. Apparently they have been taking people in from counties that are well over 40 miles away because their hospitals are unable to handle these people and there has been massive confusion. The area I live in is right near Duke and UNC Chapel Hill, both colleges with excellent Health Centers (I use both schools to handle my diabetes situations normally), so it's not like the hospital I went to is like the only one in the area.

My point is this: We're spending 87 billion dollars on a fucking war we should not have started, while hospitals in areas like mine are being filled with people from over forty miles away because the funding to the other hospitals is not enough to properly equip the hospitals in those areas. If hospitals in my area continue to be filled up over capacity like this, it seems entirely possible that people will (if they haven't already) start having their health problems seriously exacerbated, with death not being an unlikely consequence. If the government were truly for the people it would realize that helping hospitals that are underfunded, understaffed, or inapropriately equiped would be a much better humanitarian effort than "freeing" some Iraqis.

Just a rant from an annoyed college student.

[qb]

1. I am sorry to hear about the trouble you had getting health care.

Ironically, the Repugs' favorite argument against government-run (single payer) health care is that health care will be "rationed" and people will have to wait for hours!!!