Getwellbean

Mike argued with the nurses and the doctor about Kathleen's recent emesis episodes. The doctor and the nurse argued that it came from oversupplementation of her diet, which began in June, while the Davey's argued that it is related to the change in her diet from jevity 1.0 to 1.2 (which also corresponds to the day with when she began to throw up).

When Mike got home a 5:30 Kathleen's left arm was enormous and other parts of her left side were swollen. Mike called the advice nurse who told him to call an ambulance and get her to the hospital immediately. Arriving at Kaiser 15 minutes later Kathleen and Mike waited for over two hours to be seen. In the end, after nearly 3 hours, Mike was told that there was no reason he needed to come at all, and that she likely had a blood clot but the ultrasound man had gone home at 5pm. Mike, who had been under the impression that a building named Emergency might actually contain equipment for an emergency thought the situation so typical of Kaiser that rather than being mad, he actually laughed at the doctor when she told him that he needed to bring Kathleen back first thing in the morning. Thrive. It was almost a surreal experience and just another weird evening in the personal purgatory that Kathleen and I share (on different ends of the spectrum).

To be honest, the doctors and nurses were kind but seem to be incapable of rising above the uncaring and incompetent nature of our HMO system. It will be interesting to see what Michael Moore does with his new documentary on HMOs (note that Kathleen's former webmaster wrote him 18 months ago and explained Kathleen's situation to him and asked him why he hadn't done something on HMOs). Kaiser has reportedly instructed its employees not to speak with Michael Moore.

On a somewhat brighter side, Kathleen's cousin has gone through her first two rounds of chemo and is maintaining a positive attitude and getting lots of reading done.

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