Good morning Kossacks and welcome to Morning Open Thread.
We're here every morning at 6:30 a.m Eastern time. Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanent or just once in awhile. With the autopublish feature you can set it and forget it. Quite often the diarist de jour shows up much later (like me), that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Just let us know in the comments.
As I write this, I'm in a hotel in Brinkley, Arkansas, on my way to Dallas for a few days to spend some time with my best friend Cathy and her mom, who is in the hospital with an unknown ailment. I feel lucky to have the time to do it, and that my own health is good enough to hop in the car and go. Pardon any strange typos; I'm doing this on my iPad and it's a bit awkward.
Cathy's mom is 85. She's had diverticulitis for years, but this time it wasn't that, but Cathy didn't figure that out until about four days into the attack. Her mom was so dehydrated and couldn't eat, and it was time to get her to the hospital. It's been at least five days now, and the doctors still don't know what the problem is. (Maybe I should get the writers from "House" to figure it out...)
This causes me to reflect on the state of geriatric healthcare. My grandmother was extremely self sufficient until she burned her hand one day baking bread. The burn was about the size of a quarter, but it was enough that by the time she was treated, she ended up in the hospital, and to make a long story short, she never went back home. My dad had some stomach problems, and my frail mom couldn't get him out of bed, so she got an ambulance to take him to the emergency room, and he left the hospital only to be transferred to a nursing home, where he died five months later. When my mom goes to the doctor, she's told that her ailments are all in her head.
Now, I know that there will come a time for all of us when we just won't ever be going back home. But in all of these cases, I am almost 100% sure that the problem is not only over-medication, but the assumption by most doctors that old people are supposed to be achy and confused; that ill health is the status quo. I won't accept that. Every person should know whether his or her health issue is unusual or not. Why go to a doctor if age is an illness? I'm convinced that there hasn't been nearly enough research done on the effects of common medications on geriatric patients, and too often their bodies just don't process drugs like younger patients' bodies do. But that doesn't mean that we just give up on trying to treat them effectively. It's only been in the last few years that doctors realized that WOMEN respond differently than MEN, for crissakes.
I guess that's my rant for the day. I hope and pray that Cathy's mom gets better. Time will tell, and meeting the doctors will also give me some idea. I probably won't be around on Tuesday morning, so y'all will have to jibber jabber without me.