The Doc You Want — or Gamble on ER?
During the pandemic madness, I’d been lucky enough to have no critical medical issues, just the normal daily spinal cord injury drill. Then in November of 2022, I had a routine Botox bladder injection procedure done at a Portland, Oregon, hospital with my urologist-surgeon, who was employed by the hospital’s urology clinic. We liked each other and had grown to trust and respect each other. He had helped me overcome a troublesome recurring epididymitis infection when I first started seeing him. On the day of that November Botox procedure, he came to my short-stay room and told me the pandemic had left the hospital — like so many of our hospitals — in a financial bind. “The hospital’s management has decided to close the urology clinic permanently, probably in January. Everything’s up in the air,” he said. “You need to look for someone else. My future is uncertain.” And just like that, so was mine.
On February 8, I got sick — low fever, slight discharge, run-of-the-mill UTI, not the dreaded epididymitis that we had vanquished earlier. I had 12 days of Cipro left from a minor UTI to begin self-treatment while I accelerated my search for a new urologist.
But soon after starting the Cipro, I noticed rising fever, pain and swelling in my testicles. Each day for a week, I made 2-3 calls trying to find medical treatment. Pain and swelling increased alarmingly. No takers. “Go to the nearest ER,” all the nurses said, none knowing how such a seemingly simple command sounded like moving mountains to a soon-to-be-78-year-old paraplegic for more than 57 years who was now an at-risk patient, weakened after 8 days of being sick in bed and no longer able to transfer out of it or into a car safely.
My primary care doc was on vacation, but I called anyway. “Can’t we start Home Health and have someone come to me? I’ve done that before.”
“You have to come in and see the doctor first,” said the medical assistant.
“But he’s on vacation. I’m bedridden, very sick.”
“Take an ambulance to an ER.”
I wanted to say, “Listen to these words. Please. I’m a paraplegic, 78. Can’t stand or walk. Infected testicles the size of two cantaloupes. I live in the countryside. Rough snowy roads. The last time I took an ambulance, my insurance charged me $800 out-of-pocket roundtrip — and that was after three appeals and an administrative law judge review.”
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But the infected scrotal area had grown into a single hot, shiny, taut mass. My wife Sam, 73, a small, strong woman with the willpower of an NFL linebacker, my 14-year-old hormone-charged grandson and I — someone once capable of doing a floor-to-chair transfer but on this day more likely to wind up on the floor in the middle of a transfer — somehow wrestled my fevered body into my wheelchair and then into the passenger’s seat of my old minivan. Sam drove while I, hunched over in a shaky hyperventilating slump, tried to stay conscious. We have turned away from two overflowing ER hospitals on a seemingly never-ending icy journey. We finally got into a third city ER — the one that had to sacrifice an entire clinic of urologists to stay in business — where this story began.
My wife grabbed 3 ER employees by their ears and forced them to extract my sepsis-wracked body from my minivan and stash me in my wheelchair in a crowded hallway with a hundred other suffering souls in varying stages of emergency need. Fortunately, the head triage honcho took pity and moved me up in line just in time to make the 2-in-the-morning blastoff to what one day might be a Tranquility Base operating room — if only we can keep our doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals employed and have a truly affordable universal medical care system.