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G-D, Please protect me from the SUPERB health care my father receives….
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| Parent(s) |
Issue
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| Contributor | COSDem |
| Last Edited | COSDem Aug 08, 2009 02:04pm |
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| Category | Blog Entry |
| News Date | Thursday, June 25, 2009 08:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | My mother had died in October and my father was acting a bit strange. He was seeing people that weren’t there and driving to his bank at 3am…… His doctor figured he was just depressed, sent him to an HMO psychiatrist, and she prescribed some pills. Soon, Dad was crawling around searching the bushes for my mother, who he was convinced had just jumped from the third-floor balcony……..
Emergency mental health professionals got him back into the apartment, and after examining him were convinced that the drug he was on was the wrong drug.
The advertising on TV for that drug said that older people with dementia could die if they were taking that medication. “Ask your doctor…….”
I asked his HMO psychiatrist about this and she told me that she was “the doctor” and I was annoying her with all my pestering about my father.
A few weeks later we had flown my father from his apartment in Florida to my house in California. Two days before he arrived I called the Veterans Administration clinic in San Bruno. We had signed my father up for VA care a short while before (he is a WWII veteran who was stationed in Dachau during the war crimes trials against the Nazis). The receptionist at the clinic listened to my story as I told her her my father would be arriving on Friday and he needed to see a doctor.
“I’m so sorry Mr. Wiesner, we can’t possibly see him until Monday.”
“You mean, Monday, a few days from now?” I asked.
“Yes. But if he needs more urgent care you can take him to any VA hospital.”
G-D save me from government health care! (Really?)
On Monday we saw a primary care doctor and a psychiatrist. Within a few weeks the VA doctors decided that my father was indeed on the wrong medications and he began a long journey to, well, a somewhat more stable place. |
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