Words fail me, CW. I know that you and your wife are going though a tremendously difficult time right now and all I can say is that I totally empathize with your situation and I wish you and your wife nothing but the very best. Thank you for continuing to contribute to this site and for all your great insights and wisdom. God bless you.
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The best I can find for attribution of the idea is Jerry Weinberg. It isn’t a direct quote but an idea he expressed that the tendency of organizations is to prioritize the organization’s survival and growth over fulfilling their original purpose.
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Weed Agency, anyone?
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It has become far worse than that. Every bureaucracy with which I have had intimate contact - when dealing with its “customers/clients” - now only fulfills its own internal algorithms and processes, rather than actually perform its purported mission. For example, during my wife’s third recent hospitalization, she only saw a nurse for dispensing of medicines. Even then, the nurse spent about 90% of the time entering data into the computer.
Now, my wife is 71 years old and was very sick. She had C. diff diarrhea > 20 times/day. She was placed in a negative pressure isolation room and this further limited staff visits of any kind, because they were required to don a gown, gloves and mask to enter the room. Upon admission, she was accurately categorized as a “fall risk”. This required that she not get out of bed without personal help of a staff.
A few minutes after admission, she, of course, had to go to the bathroom. She rang. Of course, no answer. So, rather than shit the bed, she got out of bed & headed toward the bathroom, only to hear a piercing audible alarm. Without her knowledge, they had attached a cord to her ankle which, when pulled by departure from the bed, set off an alarm. That brought a nurse, who came without gown, gloves or mask. She promptly un-classified my wife as a “fall risk” and told her she could drag the IV pole and go to the bathroom by herself. It was a miracle that she didn’t fall, weak, unsteady and sick as she was.
Next time she did so, being modest (and not yet aware of how rare staff visits to her room would be), she locked that bathroom door. Another alarm went off, this time out at the nurses station - telling them of the locked door. Again, one came running to admonish her she was no allowed to lock the door! That was the extent of the help she received with her often greater-than-hourly emergent toilet visits.
Now, you might think that someone old and sick might have physical help getting to the bathroom with diarrhea, wouldn’t you? Never happened, not once. I stayed there as many hours as I physically could to help her. Here, again, you might think hospitals & nurses had experience in how to make things more tolerable with such things. Nope.
My wife had to wear a standard hospital gown, so long, loose and fitted with many 10 inch-long ties - all of which seemed designed to hang into the toilet!! With two free hands, I struggled, myself, to keep the damn thing from getting constantly ‘dipped in shit’! Which word serves to accurately describe the actual quality of “care” in this brand new hospital, festooned with the latest and greatest equipment; just not actual people to nurse the sick. BTW, in a six day stay neither were the sheets changed nor the room cleaned one time. No worry. All the “quality indicators” were undoubtedly entered in the proper data fields - never to ever be analyzed to actually used to improve “care”, only the data entry process.
I think this portrays the true ethos of all the bureaucratized entities which purport to “serve” us and make us “safe” from all harms - save the dehumanization and indignities inflicted on us, at our expense by our oh-so-caring overlords. In describing these sad facts, it occurs to me new superlative for “cynicism” is needed to describe the deepening hell-hole we inhabit, formerly known as the USA.
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Some years ago, a friend who was a frighteningly smart immigrant Indian had to enter hospital for treatment of what turned out to be a brain disease. His immigrant Indian wife became very agitated trying to organize friends to take food to him in hospital and provide other care. I recall trying to calm her down – Don’t worry! This is a US hospital. All such things are taken care of, part of the service.
That was then. This is now.
Oh well! Lots of lawyers would be delighted to help you sue the hospital. The financial compensation they win for the mistreatment of your wife will be passed on to other people through higher insurance prices – and no improvements at all will be made to the hospital protocols.
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Interesting CW. My take is that modern medicine is basically casino medicine. You gamble on words with patients based upon some studies that show SOME people are (gasp!) normal. Thus a 50-ish male with chest pain will STILL on his second visit to the ED be sent home if his EKG doesn’t show an acute MI and trops are negative. No consideration for crescendo angina.
I spent a week in the hospital recently because the docs put me on 40 Lasix each morning. When I was admitted, my BUN wAs 146, crest 2.8, CO2 was 10 and Hgb 6.0. And I take Ticosyn. They kept trying to find some esoteric cause; I kept saying it’s profound dehydration. In the end it seems I was right as nothing else has been found.
I am SO GLAD I got out when I did!
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I have a friend and former co-worker that was bit by an insect while in Taiwan. I cannot recall what insect or what the condition was called. He had flown to Singapore from Taiwan when he got to the hotel room he became paralyzed. I cannot recall whether he was able to text or whether his coworkers checked on him, but he was admitted to a Singapore hospital. I think he was there a couple weeks before he was flown to a US hospital.
I asked him if he was relieved to get to the US hospital. “The hospital in Singapore was so much better than the US I cannot even compare them”.
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I think most states have their own department of agriculture so they can add more bureaucratic insanity!
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I have read similar things about hospitals in Singapore.
I’ve also heard that Australians will sometimes fly to Singapore for certain medical treatments.
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This is also called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, promulgated by Jerry Pournelle at least by 2006:
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A gentleman with whom I worked went to Thailand for an operation in a Thai hospital. He was enthusiastic about the quality of medical treatment he received, bowled over by the level of care, happy with the relatively affordable cost – and he could not stop talking about the cuteness of the Thai nurses!
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Great criteria to judge a hospital on.
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This:
is the second recent film I’ve heard was not given a release to better qualify as a tax loss.
The prior one was:
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Another whistleblower has died. Age 45
Parsons said Dean became ill and went to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing just over two weeks ago. He was intubated and developed pneumonia and then a serious bacterial infection, MRSA.
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Hmmm…Note to self: Don’t get on the wrong side of the American aerospace complex.
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Your colleague went to a Thai hospital by choice?
Was he already in Thailand for business or leisure?
I have not heard anything good or bad about hospitals in Thailand.
Clintons own a lot of Boeing stock
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You might have been horrified by the dead baby photos from Gaza. The good news is - they might have been fake:
The charity backing this special fx work is real and they often sponsor “humanitarian” photo competitions, with an agenda:
There are creators on social media with huge portfolios of injured kids receiving chartalan-level medical care… or a studio torturing children for greater humanitarian goals: nahed_hajjaj99@IG