Does Altria know about this? They just furlowed a bunch of their tobacco council because of the winding down of the settlement management. Long-running litigation is still a US export! Lets go make some billable hours for the old U S of A!

Nice Fnord,

Then of course there is the case of my ma. She did her part to save your tax dollars. Avoiding even seeing a doctor once she knew the fags would probably develop some horrid black lung. When the smoking finaly put the hand of the grim reaper on her shoulder, Mass General sold her on extensive unnecessary surgery that cost Medicare 1 million dollars for 24 days of care. What sort of system sells a brain surgery to a patient that takes 3 months just to wake up  and another 3 months of therapy to recover muscular control when they have privately determined that the person has about 4 days to 2 weeks to live?

They flew her in 130 miles by life flight helicopter to the roof of the neuro surgery ward. When they kicked her out to the curb to die they refused to pay for a regular fixed wing air ambulance with a medic. Suggesting instead she travel by meat wagon the 7 hour trip by road and ferry with overnight accommodations for the medics.

Could have saved all of you a chunk of change just to tell the truth they knew, wheel her up 4 floors and load her back in the copter.  Pack her out with a pocket full of steroids for the swelling and a prescription to go home, settle into your comfiest chair, pull it close to a big warm fire in the hearth, hug your dog and wait for the inevitable.

At least she got to hang out in the room next to Ted Kennedy. And I got to have the strangest conversations with a young woman who had tripped unloading groceries and hit her head on a curb. She had no skull. They had put it in the fridge because if she wore it any longer her brain would explode from the swelling. So they sewed her scalp back on. She woke up from the induced coma and was talking. But she was no longer a human personality in the sense we know them. She was to remain that way for a month. That was some of the most bizarre stuff I have ever seen.

Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2012-03-17 09:11:00)

Yes, and so did dear ma-ma. Since we reached maturity she constantly expressed her wishes and how we were to manage it. All the paperwork was in place. Thank the goddess as we had to constantly wave the proxy under the noses of health care managers who would not follow our orders.

She even prepared us that she wished to be allowed to shuffle on off without ever telling us she was bent on letting incurable lung cancer take its course. for 6 years she said she was happy to live to 65, felt that she had lived fully and enough for 1 lifetime, and that she admittedly did not want to live to be old or decrepit.

All that mattered not when the hammer came down. Faced with well meaning and brilliant, caring, humanist doctors who wanted to do good medicine, she was steered to unnecessary surgery rather than hospice. And this was a woman who founded and sat on the initial board of a hospice program in her local town. Any promise, even a faulty one, of regaining some partial functioning to live out your last days is a powerful draw.

And when immediately after the successful?? brain surgery, she was left in the state she always told us she wished to avoid. Helpless and decrepit, unable to even do the most basic functions, like swallow on her own, or scratch her own head. All part of the normal months long recovery process. But she never spoke to us again and we were now left with the horrifying prospect of being proxies for someone who ended up with exactly what they spent their life telling us they never wanted.

What was the point of operating on someone who had terminal lung cancer,  pancreatic cancer, uterine cancer, brain cancer with the largest tumors ever seen at the world renowned neuro-sciences teaching hospital,  and who knows where else it had metastasized? 3 of the 5 things in her head were the size of lemons. How do you even fit them in the brain pan of a 107 pound woman?

Until she was struck down by motor failure it is crazy to think she had no symptoms that prevented her from walking around, let alone avoiding any health care. It was her busiest year ever as director of a national organization, which required her to travel constantly, write reports  and organize and run meetings for her staff.  And she got her one wish out of all of it. To live fully, functionally and create things with others to the end. She was truly satisfied by what she was doing those last 2 years. Top of her game even while her body was giving out under her. And the fear was setting in.

The reason to tell this story here is to not that modern medicine has a disconnect to its human aspect. They are focused on curative medicine. And sometimes do not recognize that life is incurable. But luckily some medicine is becoming more inclusive. Modern Hospice knowledge can be wonderful. But often palliative care and hospice programs do not coordinate and are at outs with the management in the hospitals. Even though they operate with the same patients. So it was at Mass General. They had a well funded palliative and hospice program outreach. But these people could not have any impact on the doctors who directed the surgery and made the choices of what to tell us and how they told it to us.

It is a long diatribe, but I wanted to show how even schooling your spawn like Emmeran may not save you. You have to learn how the system works before you find yourself navigating blind.

The happy ending here is that when we were finally told what the diagnosis actually  was, as it took weeks to get the true story from the team of doctors running her care, we pulled her from the hospital and fled the city on a bitter cold winter day.  A last cup of coffee for the last ride down that familiar path home. Checked into the small local hospice program she had help create 10 years before. Where the local hospital bent over backwards for us and knew exactly how to care for a dying person's needs. She never made it home to the fire she should have been in front of. But she released all stress in the care of the hospice oriented nurses and became peaceful again. It took but 3 days for her to die in their such a safe enveloping environment.

Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2012-03-17 16:17:56)

fnord wrote:

Johnny, obviously I didn't intend to stir up personal traumatic memories with my statements about the cost savings to a society if a large percentage of the population smokes.  However, studies in France, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere have documented that smoking is a good thing from the perspective of bean counters charged with payouts for the care of the elderly.

No worries. No stress over it. Always good to know what the bean counters have to say. Good to keep an eye on them.