My career of treating patients has ended

https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/rakxun/my_career_of_treating_patients_has_ended/

by sohkamyung • 5 years ago

221 213 5 years ago

old.reddit.com

nynx• 5 years ago

Harrowing.

refurb• 5 years ago

All a part of being a physician. My extended family has a couple. Conversations about “you’re obese and your blood sugar will kill you in 5 years unless you take this drug every day”.

And guess what? They say “that medicine is poison, I use tumeric”. Then in a few years they are dead, or blind or have both legs amputated.

Humans make horrible health choices all the time. Maybe the difference is just the scale at this point.

informationally3• 5 years ago

The real question is why have we engineered our environment so unhealthy choices are so easy to make. There are systemic issues here that go beyond individual choices. Social media is also part of the equation and we are now seeing the kind of damage it is doing to the epistemic commons. Everyone believes whatever they want to, safely cocooned in their own media echo chambers. The longer this state of affairs persists the worse things will get. Inability to deal with a pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg.

It's great that this doctor can share his experience but why is he posting this on Reddit? Why isn't this information available from trusted media sources? And for that matter, why aren't there any such trusted sources that everyone can agree is acting in their best interests and providing them with worthwhile and pertinent news?

Democracies can not survive without functional news and media sources.

chrsig4• 5 years ago

It's great that this doctor can share his experience but why is he posting this on Reddit?

Because doctors are people, and they just wanted to get the experience off their chest without any personally identifying information being disclosed?

rektide4• 5 years ago

I have a different feel that society simply does not condition people to involve themselves in the world. Society has become a teeter-totter of concern, a cycle of advancing to not having to care to suffering the ruin of having forgott4en what was so hard earned. I can only paraphrase the top quote, for I don't remember it nor who said it, but here's some related concerns,

'Society's advancement is measured by that which it may take for granted' I forgot! Help! (until it cant/that fails)
"Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet." -Aldous Huxley
"The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members." -Mahatma Ghandi

But this sometimes requires not just aiding them, treating them well, but re-socializing them, re-educating them, informing them, breaking them out of their ignorance & failings.

To simply say that we must

[re-]"engineer our environments so unhealthy choices are [not] so easy to make"

feels a folly to me. We must socialize. We must foster an aware, awake, able society. Striving to simply prevent all faults is not how we achieve success; it results in a vision of domineering & the absolute & fixedness: it bespeaks a belief that there is one true path for society & that we need only set it out & all will walk this course. It's singular utopian, a singular destiny, not a polytopia, not letting us many people discover & hunt for our own ends. Imo society must remain a dialectic, a conversation, a hunt. We must encourage growth & awareness & hunts for meaning, without insisting on a systematic & singular top choice.

I don't think social media is a part of this question:

"Everyone believes whatever they want to,"

is a false Boogeyman, a false god, a Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD), meant to scare us. We have to allow plurality, we have to allow polytopianism, we have to allow many systems, many beliefs. But we can still in aggregate steer towards informed, towards good beliefs, towards healthy ends. Trying to demonize the availability of voices & options- "safetly cocooned in their own social media echo chambers"- just misses the real point: that society doesn't have a progressive vision at large, that basically no one has a real bead on a healthy, progressive, gainful society. Everything is beset by conflict, and we are trying to make choices with very biased, limited, local regards. And there are very few clear paths, very few regardable winners.

For sure, much of what presented in the world is faulty & awful. But this too feels like a part of evolution. Simply wishing for authoritarianism, for everyone to make the right choices, for everyone to accept good dogma in the place of bad dogma: it's a disaster. And I don't think "Everyone believes whatever they want to", I think they have complex experiences which shape what they are most susceptible to, and I think most of us lack good positive role models & experiences to shape us properly forward. The world does not reward the just & righteous, it doesn't promote the healthy: it showcases greed & taking & exploitation, it showcases narcisim & delusion. It shows us an all too recent history of medical abuse & experimentation of our minorities. These aren't social media problems, these are the actual world: the actual evidence of the actual world is unclear, is deeply shadowy, is ghastly.

"The longer this state of affairs persists the worse things will get". Such appeal to authority & Fear. Such terror!!! "Inability to deal with a pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg" it itself a promise of horror & terror, it insists on & demands we obey or conform, & demands that anything else we do, any other permissiveness we permit only Immenatizes the Eschaton. To me, this high capitol fear uncertainty & doubt is the chief Immenatizing of the Eschaton there is. I don't like what people pick. I think people are incredibly stupid & full of shit. But I don't see that conformity & authority are the reagents here, I don't see that a more structured society that informs what decisions we must make will help. I believe society from the top needs to demonstrate better health, needs to make better choices easier to pick, needs to make better icons & references we can respect, that will inform what choices we freely make. Right now society simply lacks meaning. That social media is out there making it complicated is merely incidental, a scape goat, a convenient anti-authority to blame this all upon, but authority itself is shit, useless, cowards, good for nothing, and no one respects it, rightfully. Make a social contract worth believing in, society.

Arden authoritarianism is far worse than the too many choices of the very very young ur-connected world we have recently arrived at. We do need to surface & democratize better choice-making, create better supporting info-networks & options of choice. But recognize first that the 4th age information society is very young, and that simply wishing to stuff it back in the bottle/box, blaming it, & being upset we don't do better is not going to help. And recognize that there are so many 1st 2nd & 3rd age society problems still dogging us, still making things enormously difficult, and recognize that those need remedy & addressal to before society can ever really right itself & find progress. Fearing pop-culture society, it's superficial glam, is a misdeed: what is really weak is society itself, is the unhelpful, unprogressive, un-gainful world that has failed to create better circumstances. I don't blame the people. I don't think we must outmanuever people, to make unhealthy choices impossible/harder. To me, it's less about trying to fight against the baleful/evil, and more about creating the construtive/positive. Social media will spread the good too, will snuff out the darkness, if we have it, if there's the sunlight to spread.

BLKNSLVR4• 5 years ago

The real question is why have we engineered our environment so unhealthy choices are so easy to make.

The combination of freedom, capitalism, and greed. This is why I can't be entirely sure that China's approach isn't potentially longer term sustainable, as much as I disagree with it - it might actually be a better way to deal with the stubborn-ness of stupidity that's so inherent to humanity (to be fair, all these traits must have served us well when Pringles and Pop Tarts weren't cheap and easily available).

Cigarettes. How did they become a thing? What, ever, was their redeeming feature? At least Pringles and Pop Tarts taste nice.

Social media is just a more-efficient distillation of what traditional media has profited from since it began. It's not new human-hacking, it's just an efficiency bump that's actually more facilitated by the internet and pocket-portable devices with access to it.

RobertRoberts• 5 years ago

To tell people to choose between a pill and death without discussing the underlying cause of the problem _is_ the problem.

Ethics and morality used to be a cornerstone of medicine.

BLKNSLVR4• 5 years ago

I'm sure the original comment is merely a summation of the conversation rather than its entirety. The point I get from the above, is that it doesn't matter how, why, what, when of the conversation, recommendation, reasons, root causes, treatments, lifestyle changes - they's goin' stay the course, right over the cliff.

cm20126• 5 years ago

Research shows that nothing doctors recommend has any effect on weight loss except bariatric surgery. This has been shown over and over again in every study. Doctor moralizing is pointless, people know they are supposed to be eating right.

Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.

1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453)

2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full)

3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/)

4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...) This is borne out by the above data.

5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/)

Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.

hermes83293• 5 years ago

I am facing taking the mountain of pills or die situation right now. I know what the underlying cause was but in reality it is irrelevant to anything now. The event happened and now i deal with the fallout. The cause was not predictable due to lifestyle or anything else. It was simply like being struck by lightening.

So why do i care about the cause again? I dont. it was a non reversible event

UncleOxidant• 5 years ago

In many cases it's not even “that medicine is poison, I use tumeric”, more often it's "I don't care, I'll keep drinking the sodas, eating the chips and not exercising". The folks into the tumeric, herbs etc. are also likely to be more into exercise and eating healthier so they end up with better outcomes not due to the tumeric (or whatever herbs), but because they have at least some interest in their health. The more difficult ones are like my BiL who told me recently that drinking full sugar sodas actually lower his blood sugar.

imtringued4• 5 years ago

In my opinion almost all heart surgeries can be avoided with a better diet (no I don't mean low fat). Nobody cares. Especially not the government which lets the food industry get away with giving people food that is engineered to be a health hazard.

wdr1• 5 years ago

I mean isn't that basically what happened with Steve Jobs?

When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he decided to forgo the aggressive medical treatment advised by doctors, opting instead of acupuncture & fruit juices.

gataca• 5 years ago

He got very lucky with the type of pancreatic cancer he had, it was detected so early that surgery would likely have been curative. So sad that it ended the way it did.

buildsjets• 5 years ago

Exocrine Pancreatic cancer has negligible 5-year survival rates with the most radical and invasive modern treatments.

Acupuncture and fruit juices are just as effective, with a much lower incidence of side effects. I’d choose that treatment option as well. There’s nothing unethical about palliative care.

dado3212• 5 years ago

Their whole comment history is just terrifying.

hhw3h2• 5 years ago

If someone is on downward trajectory towards death, why not give them cheap generics at human safe doses? Aren't physicians supposed to do risk benefit analyses? Sure they can feel the odds of benefit are slim to none but if the risk is slim to none as well, why not let them have what they ask for?

Also the doctor made no mention of other therapeutics that do have more expert consensus of helping like monoclonal antibodies or fluvoxamine. I'm sorry to hear that they have decide to leave medicine and that they were assaulted. Violence is never called for. That said, it's unclear if all tools in the current tool belt were used in this patient's case.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/dying-covid-19-patient-recover...

edited to reference another site: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-ivermectin-e...

i totally get that it's anecdotal. my point is more about just allowing people the opportunity to try therapeutics especially ones that have been proven to help in many cases like monoclonal antibodies or have little to no risk of harm.

gizmo3852• 5 years ago

I'd recommend citing a source that isn't the Epoch Times. And we shouldn't have our medical staff wasting their time on things that we know don't work just because folks who trust Facebook memes more than trained professionals think that some essential oil cures COVID-19.

masonic3• 5 years ago

You're suggesting that the linked judicial order[1] is faked, then?

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/538389544/Action-Order-Man-K...

falcolas2• 5 years ago

I said this elsewhere, but you’re still culpable for murder if you kill someone in the process of killing themselves.

If someone is on downward trajectory towards death, why not give them cheap generics at human safe doses?

What is a human safe dose for someone whose body is so compromised that they’re close to death? If the doctor prescribes a medication that doesn’t have, at a minimum, peer reviewed research showing its effectiveness in these situations, they are going to be liable for negligent manslaughter, if not murder.

And rightly so, when you think of the broader implications of allowing doctors to do whatever they want to the dying.

hhw3h2• 5 years ago

they are going to be liable for negligent manslaughter, if not murder.

hmm could they then not simply allow patients to sign liability waivers?

hirako20002• 5 years ago

It doesn't read like coming from a medical professional.

hourislate• 5 years ago

Holy Fuck people it's a shit posting on reddit. Do you think this story is real?

Good Lord, I thought HN was smart enough to see through the reddit garbage.

LanceH• 5 years ago

All his posts are rants against qanon and he's suddenly lucky enough to be a victim and immediately quits. He doesn't press charges because he'll be a national level target. Never mind that an assault like this at the hospital would result in an arrest regardless of a desire to press charges.

Nevermind the whole thing reads like fanfic: "Through tears, he rasped out sounds I could vaguely understand as a question. I guessed at what he was asking, and assured him that yes, his family was coming."

The whole post is awful, and even entertaining it here is absurd. When people complain HN is becoming like Reddit, this is what they're talking about.

hnthrow1372• 5 years ago

I've been able to deal with the years of patients who attended Google Medical School

Run as fast as you can away from doctors and other healthcare providers who think like this. Healthcare providers who have this particular arrogance can create very severe health issues for you and your family with their hubris. There are incredible doctors out there who also have humility when it comes to their own knowledge and will answer your questions and listen to you and take you seriously when you come to them with your own research.

The human body is orders and orders and orders of magnitude more complex than the most elite and advanced human endeavors of engineering. It's almost not even comparable. You have to have extreme humility in the face of such complexity and in the age of Google and open access to medical journals there is just so much to know and so much that is available that any doctor or healthcare provider who would dismiss the value of patients and caretakers doing their own research is really someone who is very dangerous to you and your loved ones.

djakaitis• 5 years ago

If it is so complex why would a lay person googling things suddenly be the better way to diagnose?

rektide4• 5 years ago

If it is so complex why would a lay person googling things suddenly be the better way to diagnose?

It's not about "be the better way".

It's about being able to to entertain & consider multiple theories, versus just being an asshole who won't even regard any convictions except your own.

Google Medical School doesn't have to be right every time. It doesn't have to be the more consistent option to be not "the better way", but simply worth entertaining. It doesn't have to be right 10% of the time. Some suffering patients will find & learn & discover things that do seem to fit their own problems. Being an asshole doctor who disregards, who writes off alternate theories: that's the wrong fucking way, and fuck those doctors, run the fuck away, get them fired, get them blacklisted, & warn other people. That's the wrong way.

There's no one more invested in a patients health than the patient. The resources of time & analysis they'll put in to trying to figure out what could be an issue is far far higher than what the medical system can provide for all but the very very richest of people. The resources out there to figure stuff out are real. Is it a better way? No. The patient doesn't have years and years of medical school. But that doesn't make their way wrong. That doesn't make them caring about themselves wrong, doesn't make their quest for truth & healing wrong. Any doctor that would turn their nose up at a patient, would refuse to hear a patient out, that refuses to acknowledge how wonderful & accessible medical information is in the world, and how helpful that can be: they are strictly worse. Worse diagnosticians, and worse people.

omgwtfbyobbq• 5 years ago

They likely wouldn't be. At the same time, I wouldn't want my doctor to dismiss things just because I happened to suggest it.

Arcsech3• 5 years ago

This is a great question! In my experience, the differences come down to:

- The doctor is going off a very short explanation you gave in a 30-minute appointment. If you have a serious medical problem, you can dump days, weeks, or months into finding information that matches your experience down to the fine details, which can very much matter - especially if you have an unusual case of something.

- There may be new information since your doctor was trained. Medicine has advanced a lot, and while doctors do their best to keep up, there’s more new research than any one person can digest.

- You will always believe yourself, never dismiss your experiences as “exaggerated” or “drug seeking”, and never blame your conditions on obviously unrelated causes.

That last one is especially relevant to people who aren’t cis white dudes. I’ve witnessed, with my own eyes, a woman talk to a doctor about chronic nasal congestion, and his response was to tell her to lose weight. Doctors habitually not believing the experiences of their patients has done incredible harm over the years.

hnthrow1372• 5 years ago

It wouldn't be better necessarily. Generally you want to get the opinions of multiple doctors and do your own research and use your own judgement in evaluating the advice you're getting. The point is that in the face of such enormous complexity the difference between a layperson with a rudimentary understanding of biology and your average doctor is not much. The difference is more pronounced when you're talking about people who are in the very top of their field but those people tend to be quite open minded and curious in my experience. They have such depth of knowledge that they are aware of how little they know.

It's also important to distinguish between technique and knowledge. The difference between a layperson and their surgeon is enormous, a layperson and their doctor, not so much in the grand scheme of things.

chevill• 5 years ago

My wife has a few chronic illnesses so I've encountered more doctors than the average person. There are two primary types that account for all but one or 2 out of around 30 that we have seen in order to attempt to get my wife effective help.

1. The type that's too incompetent to diagnose anything more complicated than a cold or a broken bone. Usually they are general practitioners, sometimes they are specialists.

2. The type that might have been a productive person but they are too arrogant and/or lazy to diagnose anything but the most common things that pop up in their specialization. If its starting to look like its going to take any amount of effort at all to diagnose they'll throw their hands up and literally claim they don't know and its probably just something you'll have to live with.

It would be foolish for a layperson to think they can train themselves to be a doctor using google and diagnose a wide range of medical conditions in a large group of random patients better than a doctor. Its not foolish at all to think that given you have all the time in the world since its your life, that you might be able to do some productive things and try to figure out what could theoretically be wrong with you so you can make a more educated guess about which specific specialist might be able to diagnose your condition or rule out one that you suspected you might have. 99% of doctors are going to make a basic effort and then pretend its just some unknown chronic thing you probably shouldn't worry about, even if you feel like you are dying on a daily basis. Or diagnose you for one of the common things that doesn't fit your symptoms, give you medicine that will either not help at all or actually exacerbate your condition, and then double down on the diagnosis. And its not just about finding the right type of specialist, you can go to two specialists within the same field and one can be completely worthless to you because they have no experience with your set of symptoms.

I've gotten too many blank stares from doctors when asking them basic things that they should know to buy into the notion we seem to promote in the US that all of them are geniuses.

FYI Not an anti-medicine, anti-vax conspiracy nut. I just went through a nightmarish ordeal for several years trying to get help for my wife. Her condition is a physical condition that's misdiagnosed 80% of the time as anxiety. Once you have anxiety listed on your medical record, good fucking luck getting any of these arrogant assholes to do their job. Once you do get a diagnosis, the results of treatment are pretty mixed, but mostly not amazing. Fortunately it doesn't significantly shorten a person's life, but it does make it difficult to live it.

I've seen mildly famous and wealthy youtubers (famous for being sick youtubers, in some cases having the same condition as my wife) get teams of doctors working together hand in hand to figure out some rare set of conditions and make a person's life better. Most doctors I've encountered will figuratively tell you to go fuck yourself if you even want them to talk to another specialist. The closest I came to that was spending several thousand dollars sending her to the Mayo clinic. They rush you through a series of tests and then send you home without doing much of anything at all, hoping that you have a good team of doctors that can pick up where they left off. If you don't (and you won't) its a massive waste of time and money.

giantg2• 5 years ago

Generally agree, but can also see the other side. What you are talking about are people who are using sources like PubMed or even WebMD, etc. These at least help patients as reasonable questions even if they don't fully understand what they read. Then a discussion can take place.

I think what they are talking about are people using terrible sources (garlic curing HIV example). Then demanding that they are right.

So really, what we see here on both sides as the root cause are people who are not interested in a discussion and simply assert they are right. Dangerous if a patient does it, also dangerous if a doctor does it.

0xB31B1B• 5 years ago

The other thing you don't see is how stupid the p05 patient is. Its not someone reading primary sources or coming in well informed. Its someone coming in saying Dr Oz says that eating blueberries cures cancer.

sho• 5 years ago

Run as fast as you can away from doctors and other healthcare providers who think like this

For every 1 person who actually has discovered something useful or accurately self-diagnosed with some very well-done research, there are surely 10,000 complete idiots who have swallowed hook, line and sinker the first nutball result they read, which they now believe 100% and if you don't agree you're an ignorant, indeed murderous enemy.

It's completely understandable to me why doctors take this stance.

stephen_g2• 5 years ago

Yep, while it can be frustrating to be in the small percentage of people who are able to evaluate the validity of research, it's totally understandable why doctors are dismissive given how much rubbish is flowing around that people come up with.

Often it just requires a bit of pushing if it's a simple diagnostic test. "Can we just do this blood test to completely rule out [x]?". I remember about a decade ago my father was getting this extremely bad dermatitis on his elbows for years, and mum had researched and found coeliac (celiac) disease could cause that as a symptom. The GP was prescribing steroid creams, and they really had to push him to do a blood test to check for those antibodies. He thought it was dumb but gave in just to shut them up! Came back positive, next step was an endoscopy, which showed massive inflammation in the small intestine. Dad cut gluten out of his diet and over the next year the dermatitis and intestinal inflammation disappeared.

rebuilder2• 5 years ago

Please consider the context here. This is specifically about people who refuse vaccines but demand their dying loved ones be treated with huge doses of vitamin C or antiparasitics with no proven effect against the disease.

pavlov• 5 years ago

Assuming you’re a software engineer: how would you feel about a customer who comes to your workplace and aggressively tells you you really should be using The Blockchain to solve everything, because he read that on Twitter and you’re obviously in Big Tech’s pocket for not using it already.

readflaggedcomm• 5 years ago

If the engineer responds by harboring a grudge against all encryption, and silently failing to employ secure industry standards, then neither he nor his other customers win. Medical professionals treat individuals, not political groups.

rektide4• 5 years ago

What a callous way to put it! Patients suffering from diseases & conditions aren't trying to swab some magic block-dust on problems. They have symptoms & are desperate for help. Their ability to invest time in & explore possible conditions doesn't match up to a medical degree, but it's still considerable, and in spite of there being a lot of fluff & misconstruable & useless information, there's a ton of real, valuable, & good information too.

It does have to suck to have a lot of badly informed people parroting silly ideas they casually picked up online. But to so callously write off everyone, to so easily disregard any opinion & information other than your own, with what limited time you've got to examine a patient? Detestable, just absolutely revileable: this person has deeply failed their oath.

I also don't think your scenario is fair. The customer isn't just showing up & ordering you around. As a doctor, the patient is the product. The product is speaking for itself, asking for help. It's also paying you fairly well for your time & services. And as I said above, there's a good chance the product is well informed about itself. To write this off as a case of idiots making pointless requests- I can not disagree hard enough about what a callous, disregardful view this is. There are plenty of times when yes, the patient has fed themselves garbage, the patient is way off base, but let them not be so easily out of hand dismissed, let not the workplace maintain such a sense of absolute smug over the idiot rubes of the world.

vkou• 5 years ago

Just curious - what is your opinion of non-technical managers that, upon arriving back to work from a conference, order their teams to implement a buzzword bingo soup, without being able to articulate why their life-critical aerospace software suddenly needs to support SOAP over REST backed by HADOOP, all implemented in Golang monads.

froggertoaster• 5 years ago

Entirely this. There are plenty of bad doctors out there - it does not hurt to be educated.

WalterBright6• 5 years ago

I like to read up on something first so that I can have an intelligent conversation with the doctor.

imtringued4• 5 years ago

I only agree with the sentiment. The problem is that doctors aren't here to improve your life, they are here to treat symptoms and diseases when it's already too late.

If the solution to your particular disease involves a year of changing your lifestyle then no doctor on earth is going to help you. (it's not their job)

asdfk-12• 5 years ago

This reads like 3rd rate propoganda. No possibility of supplying monoclonal antibodies?

anshumankmr• 5 years ago

What are those?

indrora2• 5 years ago

Snake oil, basically.

grioghar4• 5 years ago

He actually explains that in one of his other replies: after 10 days of infection, you’re not fighting the virus anymore, so monoclonal antibodies are useless.

Covid, the virus, doesn’t typically kill you directly: the cytokine storm that some people seem to have afterwards is what kills them.

That’s why people making statement about “my immune system is strong” are speaking from a position of ignorance. You don’t want an over-reaction of your immune system in response to viral load. This is what the vaccine helps with by giving your immune system a chance to develop an immune response without having to go nuclear trying to clear the infection.

The storm is why people are ok at day 7-10, then suddenly crash on day 11-4, seemingly out of the blue. They have a hyperactive response that begins destroying healthy tissue, particularly the lungs and the heart, given the concentration of ACE-2 receptors, which is where the virus binds easiest to. Your immune system, still trying to develop an answer to this novel infection, goes scorched earth to attempt to clear any and all rogue RNA that is detected.

That’s when you lungs start to hardened and fill and pneumonia kicks in; it’s all the dead tissue in your lungs from your now CoVid-induced autoimmune disorder.

This is why steroids are given - they blunt the various inflammatory responses a cytokine storm brings on. Problem is, your immune system do go hard in the paint, and sends EVERYTHING it has.

This is why using an anti-parasitic in this moment makes a whole lot of no sense.

This is why HCQ makes no sense at this stage.

The new oral anti-virals have the same issue: you have to get tested, diagnosed, and get these into you AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. The oral antivirals that are being tested stop the replication process of the virus, or that’s the goal.

The less viral load, hopefully a more blunted immune response, the less or no organ destruction.

Make sense?

dadjoker• 5 years ago

A sad story for sure, and I don't doubt that it is real. But I can't help but wonder, considering how many people have actually been infected with the virus and miraculously survived, are these stories the rule, or the exception?

lliamander• 5 years ago

These are undoubtedly the exception. Now, i can understand that the exception can feel like the rule when your job is to deal with the exception, but most people who get COVID don't die or go to the hospital.

That doesn't mean that COVID isn't bad, or that people shouldn't consider getting the vaccine (especially if they are old, obese, or have diabetes). It just means that his experience is not representative of what COVID is like for most people.

Dumblydorr3• 5 years ago

The issue now is doctors see the severely ill, the vast majority of whom are unvaccinated. And what other qualities go with lack of vaccination? Belief in ivermectin, love of far right conspiracies, paranoia about microchips or God knows what else. So, while I doubt doctors noses get broken frequently, I'm sure they see a ton of brainwashed Q whackos as severely ill patients.

alfiedotwtf• 5 years ago

You're seeing the reverse of survivorship bias - those who aren't getting sick don't need to present to the hospital, but from those that do, they are most likely at risk of dying.

etchalon2• 5 years ago

The world wide survival rate is around 2%. So for every 50 people who are infected, only 1 will die.

So the stories are the exception.

However, they're also very common.

If 1 out of every 50 people who ate at a McDonald's in America died, 50,000 people would die every day [https://financesonline.com/number-of-mcdonalds-in-north-amer...].

stephen_g2• 5 years ago

I assume you meant mortality rate, not survival rate there.

nradov7• 5 years ago

The world wide infection fatality rate is nowhere near 1 in 50. The CDC estimated the US fatality rate at 0.6% back when hardly anyone was vaccinated, and Americans have worse survival rates than most other countries due to having a relatively old and unhealthy population.

tsol2• 5 years ago

The exception being the issue is true for many diseases. On a large scale, the exception can add up to thousands of people. Take polio, the great fear of yesterday;

Up to 95 percent of people infected with polio have no symptoms. However, infected persons without symptoms can still spread the virus and cause others to develop polio. About four to five percent of infected people have minor symptoms such as fever, muscle weakness, headache, nausea and vomiting. One to two percent of infected persons develop severe muscle pain and stiffness in the neck and back. Less than one percent of polio cases result in paralysis.*

Despite most cases being harmless, polio was considered a huge public health issue worldwide. The small percentage of cases that developed paralysis added up, essentially becoming a roulette for the majority of children. This is because it was still transmitted easily and rapidly, so it spread through millions of people quickly.

Covid can be seen similarly. Yes most people are fine. The same way that most people that get into car accidents are fine. And yet I don't think it'd be a stretch to say most people probably know at least one person that has suffered serious health complications due to covid

* https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/poliomyeliti...

grioghar4• 5 years ago

The age-old ‘those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.’

And

‘History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.’

TrackerFF• 5 years ago

Of course, most have. But the sad reality today is that those in the risk groups, are vastly overrepresented in the ICU units. Here in Norway, the stats were something like the following:

Around half of those admitted were unvaccinated people in their 50s, the other half vaccinated and in their 80s. The former group was something like 5-7 times more represented. I think 90% of them were overweight or obese.

So, yeah, seems like if you get admitted to the ICU today, you're either a fully vaccinated very old senior citizen, or unvaccinated high-risk individual in your 50s.

grioghar4• 5 years ago

The issue is the R naught. (Arrr Not)

This is the number of people you will spread the infection to.

Flu has a R of 1.

Covid Alpha/Beta have a R of 3-5.

Delta has a R7-9.

Omicron is allegedly 15+, and unlike anything we’ve ever seen outside Measles.

Giving you a death rate of 1% infected, to keep it easy. Current numbers in the US are 1.56%.

So, 1% dead of spread of a R1 is going to be a lot slower and manageable versus 1% of R7. The exponential (Logarithmic?) rise of infections will kill a lot more, a lot faster, and have knock-on effects everywhere within the healthcare system, and society as a whole.

The only hope is that by rule, typical virus evolutions are less virulent, but we’re still not sure of that at this time. The big fear with omicron is that the spike protein mutations are immune-system dodging and faster infecting/more contagious, but that the payload within is still functionally the same. The mutations not on the spike are not changed enough that virologists are hopeful at this time.

Sorry, wall of text. Hope this addresses the question.

roenxi4• 5 years ago

I actually struggle to see this guy's perspective. If a family are that desperate for their relative to be given ivermectin/hydroxychloroquine/god knows what else it isn't obvious why he wouldn't hand them out.

The role of a doctor, when someone is sick, is to offer good advice and stop them doing anything that will be really damaging to themselves. I'd see this as more similar to a dying man getting access to a priest than anything else.

Maybe this woman would have been screaming at him anyway, but I can see why she would be angry. He is obviously being a bit arrogant. The dude was dying, let the family believe what they want at that point.

Dumblydorr3• 5 years ago

Doctors take a Hippocratic oath to do no harm. They must follow an ethical code. Ivermectin is pointless for that treatment, and would have terribly harming side effects. If you think otherwise, it's clear why you don't understand the MD's rationale.

roenxi4• 5 years ago

This patient died, the doctor claims he can tell who is going to die (which seems pretty reasonable). It doesn't get much worse than dying of respiratory failure as horrible side effects go. The risks from ivermectin are very low and it is a routinely proscribed drug.

He'd have made life easier for himself and the family by saying "this won't work, but if you can foot the bill and will feel better about it then OK".

mmcgaha3• 5 years ago

So really it is hard not to be snarky about your comment on the terribly harming side effects on the guy that is about to be dead.

dehrmann• 5 years ago

Unless we're talking about controlled substances, tell the patient it won't help and is a bad idea. If they insist, give them a release to sign. Once you inform the patient, you're past the point of doing harm.

marderfarker2• 5 years ago

Those behavior boils down to human nature of shifting blame and responsibilities.

I’m glad my parents droned into me that nobody can take care of my health except myself.

fnord77• 5 years ago

I think the part about not pressing charges gives this away as being fictional. As someone mentioned in the comments, an assault is a mandated report, and the author claimed security witnessed it. If charges were filed, it would be easy to verify this story.

zwkrt• 5 years ago

This is naive. I have been in the doctors position of being assaulted by a patient. No one is going to force you to call the police and to talk to them and to tell them what happened and to press charges. In my case I declined because the person was having a crisis and losing everything and I didn’t feel like also making them the target of government intervention.

I don’t know what I would have done in their situation but if it caused them to quit their job I wouldn’t put it past them not to uphold the duties of said job.

lemmsjid3• 5 years ago

I’ve looked at a variety of articles on the subject. The belief that incidents are underreported is commonplace. Here is an example: https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/11/09/would-legislation-curb-v...

I worked in a similar environment and most violent incidents were not reported unless it was people doing violence on one another rather than staff.

mikeyouse• 5 years ago

Who knows if this specific story is true or not, and I'm just a random anonymous user so $0.02 more on the pile, but I have a family member who's been a hospitalist for 40 years...

Their experience basically mirrors this up until the assault. According to them, they've never had so many patients and family members fight them for every single decision they make -- they're bringing in all these ridiculous printouts about "give me these vitamins and steroids on this schedule" and of course they want HCQ and IVM still. None of them will accept responsibility for not being vaccinated, they blame the medical staff when they don't get better like they think they should, they all see intubation as the step that kills their loved ones instead of a last chance to save them.. it's enough that my family member is retiring rather than deal with it any more.

My family member works at a small hospital in the Midwest and more than one patient has accused them of "working with Dr. Fauci" to prolong the pandemic. Just complete nutball bullshit.

All of the quacks promoting these horrible "cures" while convincing millions of people to not get vaccinated should lose their licenses. I doubt there will ever be any consequences for the non-credentialed talking heads doing the same but man have they inflicted a massive amount of suffering on their viewers. I hope the culture war was worth the weight on their consciences.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

Honestly, what has been exceedingly scary to me in the past couple years is how tribalism in the US has gotten to such extremes that people are now willing to actually die instead of admit they were wrong.

I mean, sure, the ease with which people have decided they can argue against easily demonstrable facts over the past 5-10 years has been unsettling, but I thought when push came to shove, and their lives and their loved ones' lives were on the lines, people would come around. But a sizable portion of the country is now in a full-on death cult.

And to be clear, I can understand there are plenty of things about the pandemic and the pandemic response that can be debated, but a huge portion of the country is miles off the deep end into full on crazyville. Even Trump was loudly booed recently when he said he got a booster.

avidiax• 5 years ago

I think the headstrong tribalism has been around forever. The difference is that now it's being headstrong about matters that are both life & death and unavoidable in daily life.

Somebody the vehemently believes that the rapture is coming and the Earth is 3,000 years old rarely gets a reason to punch anyone over such beliefs.

Trump publicly announcing that he got a booster made me respect him more. He could have (and politically should have) kept silent.

jareklupinski2• 5 years ago

I don't think this is real. remember the first rule of reddit:

"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

jethro_tell• 5 years ago

That account's post history is pretty consistent. I would highly doubt that's made up but it could be? :shrug:

maxbond2• 5 years ago

It jumped out to me as fake immediately, as well. It's impossible to say for certain, of course, but it rhymes with other Reddit fakery. Specifically in being a one-note account that seems entirely focused on providing testimony to the awfulness of a particular group, that being QAnon.

Here's a pretty interesting video essay about online fakery, with a heavy focus on Reddit fakery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiU7aGZ-o68

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

It is the writing style that makes me tend to not believe him. Sounds like an essay of an inexperienced author more than a recapitulation by a medical professional.

Doesn't mean the story itself isn't true, but I would expect the author writing about someone else and not himself.

ugh123• 5 years ago

Read their comment history. Doubt they'd put that much effort in just to fake posts about being a doctor in the trenches...

maxbond2• 5 years ago

You may be interested in digging into some internet cultural history. I don't pretend to know if this person is lying or not, but people making a strange hobby out of lying on the internet is nothing new. I can't imagine doing that, I'm guessing you can't either, but there's some other perspectives out there that find this appealing. I don't pretend to understand, but it's just how it is.

Some examples from the top of my head:

A woman named MsScribe spent years fabricating harassment against herself so that she could gain influence in her community and join the moderation team of a fan fiction website. She would create sock puppets to attack herself, so that the community would rally around her, over and over again.

A reddit user spent years creating "fake fake stories". They made obviously fake stories, which they put a lot of effort into, such as writing poetry and drawing comics. They would post these stories to places like r/thathappened, as if someone had genuinely tried to pass these off as real stories. Their goal seemed to be to present the communities these fictional authors belonged to as ridiculous, they were building straw men. I don't remember the name of this user, but this is presented in the video I linked in a sibling comment.

(Both of these people eventually admitted to this behavior when confronted.)

halfmatthalfcat• 5 years ago

Isn't that the 4chan motto?

jareklupinski2• 5 years ago

you know the rules :)

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

No, that's Ebaum's world's :)

lemmsjid3• 5 years ago

One doesn’t need to look far to find similar circumstances in the public record. While the Reddit post could be an elaborate creative writing exercise, there’s many recent news articles about upswings of violence against healthcare workers where circumstances similar to the Reddit post (patient visitation restrictions) were implicated in both verbal and physical violence. Below are examples.

https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-19-patients-family-mem...

https://www.sfreporter.com/news/2021/11/23/christus-st-vince...

https://www.wkyc.com/amp/article/news/health/violence-agains...

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/hospitals-refused...

And here’s a doctor describing the conflict, frustration and regret of unvaccinated late term patients:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-12/doctor-ange...

barbazoo• 5 years ago

The moment they described how the patient was asking whether his family was coming I felt such a profound feeling of sadness. Imagine being alone in that moment of your life, the very last moment. I felt like I knew what death would be like and it was heartbreaking. Whether this was 100% real I don't care. This kicked me right in the feelings.

jb3689• 5 years ago

Imagine being alone in that moment of your life because someone couldn't bother to wear a mask around you or someone you love and you are immunocompromised. No sympathy for the devil

bee_rider• 5 years ago

I wonder if there could be a market for a service to link up cooperative patients and doctors who are tired of dealing with uncooperative patients, in a non-emergency setting.

octokatt• 5 years ago

Dear ye gods, this would be awesome. Pairing up patients with difficult conditions, but who take fantastic data and are compliant to care guidelines with doctors who genuinely want to help patients over a long period of time.

rich_sasha• 5 years ago

It exists!

Plug for a friend: https://trustedoctor.com/

femiagbabiaka• 5 years ago

The poster explicitly calls out Facebook and the risk of getting pulled into a life-ruining web of conspiracy theorists as a reason for not pressing charges:

A recognition that doing so would be putting a target on me, my family, my colleagues and my hospital for all of the violent Q-Anon people. The arrest would be local and possibly national news. It would subject these children to deep pain. Worse, though, it would hit Facebook, and within no time, my name, my kids' names, and my wife's name would be all over their sites. All of us would be threatened. These people are unpredictable, but seem to crave violence. I don't want to be responsible for one of my colleagues being shot in the parking lot because I became a national symbol of Q-Anon hospital violence.

Consultant32452• 5 years ago

I smell a hoax. Looking at the poster's history there are a bunch of posts that are practically copy pastes of each other.

He makes a couple of blatantly dubious medical claims. For example he claims that Ivermectin doesn't work (probably true) with a followup claim that it does work but you have to give so much you'd OD from it.

In other posts he claims "every ICU patient is covid" which is a repeated hoax we've seen. At the very least it doesn't differentiate people in ICU who have covid vs people in ICU because of covid, and how many of the people caught their covid while in the hospital/ICU, etc.

ICUs aren't full. If this is actually a doctor and they are actually in an ICU that's temporarily full, it definitely is not always full. Statistically ICU beds in hospitals are at pre-pandemic vacancy levels.

Lastly, and this isn't really fact based, but it's too "on the nose". The whole narrative they've created is like it was written by a third rate script writer to sell the narrative. It's "too perfect" for his side. The truth is bad enough, people really are dying and suffering. There really are a lot of conspiracy people. But it's just to clean for his side.

mariuolo• 5 years ago

For example he claims that Ivermectin doesn't work (probably true) with a followup claim that it does work but you have to give so much you'd OD from it.

Ivermectin does work in vitro, but the equivalent effective dosage would kill a person.

TigeriusKirk• 5 years ago

It sets off every alarm bell I have and it's being spread far and wide by people who consider themselves too savvy to fall for something as obviously fake as QAnon. The irony is thick sometimes.

twofornone• 5 years ago

I have seen people struggling to breathe through lungs that have hardened to near uselessness, begging us in their ignorance to give them the vaccine now.

I really have trouble believing that this isn't just a propaganda meme. What proportion of the population actually believes that a vaccine will cure them post infection? More importantly, how are all of these people uttering vaccine requests when their lungs are failing? Isn't it a little hard to talk when you're in the end stage of a severe lung infection?

Linking these unvaccinated deaths to qanon conspiracists in the second sentence further makes me doubt that this is an actual doctor reporting on their experience. This is reddit, after all, a heavily astroturfed (and opaquely controlled) propaganda machine.

indrora2• 5 years ago

Have several friends in healthcare. Multiple have relayed similar stories.

However, to your question: how many of these people are begging for the vaccine, and how?

It's a surprising number. These patients don't understand how vaccines work outside of movies and TV, and as such think it's either bullshit or at the last minute feel like it's a miracle.

Because at the end of the road, you realize that you've been told lies by those you trusted. There's a clarity in the end moments. Situations like these where you have no choice but to think about what you've been told and the ramifications of your actions.

And so these people fall back on the last thing that wasn't at least blatantly false, which is a social understanding of medicine. Vaccines cure diseases, or so we're told in our school days. So much of the American medical psyche is built around medicine being a solution for the current ailment, not a prophylactic for the likely future.

A huge part of the antivax rhetoric is "but I'm healthy now". They don't see it as preventing illness in the future. To them a vaccine is an antidote, a fix for a problem.

And so they beg for the antidote when it is obvious that they are at the end of the line. They don't understand that it's not a fix for now, it's prevention for later.

As for how they can: function degrades, yes, but its biggest impact is on duty cycle. You go from being able to talk constantly to mustering enough energy to speak a few minutes at a time to making it 30 seconds, to 4...5 seconds, to losing it entirely. You get bursts of energy, but each burst comes with a toll. Maybe a few more moments here but a long delay as you recover from it.

lemmsjid3• 5 years ago

You don’t have to look far to find similar stories on the public record.

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/22/us-coronavir...

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/07/22/health/hospitalized-patie...

https://www.wfxrtv.com/news/health/coronavirus/dying-covid-p...

SergeAx2• 5 years ago

This is not smells good for me. The entire text sounds overly emotional and inaccurate for a medical professional. One example:

the body can only absorb a maximum of 100 mg a day, with the rest creating the world's most expensive urine

An adult can absorb up to 500 mg of vitamin C: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12134712/

And vitamin C is one of the cheapest supplements, at least in that part of globe I currently in. The entire line about "expensive urine" is taken from a handbook of party conversations.

johnwalkr• 5 years ago

Very elaborate writing exercise if it’s just a story, check his post history.

disambiguation• 5 years ago

I'm checking their post history.. I'm honestly not sure what to make of it.

https://redditmetis.com/user/thanosrain

Account created October 14, 2019

135 total comments

102 of which are in /r/QAnonCasualties

Other top subreddits include HermanCainAwards, CovIdiots, and Quit_Headquarters.

Some comments in AskReddit and others, almost exclusively about covid.

This doesn't say much about the persons identity, but they're clearly not coming to the site to have fun.

Submission by weekday is also interesting, high on weekdays, low on weekends, highest on Monday.

I hate to be skeptical because I have doctor friends that have similar covid stories, but this post is quite sensational, newsworthy even. I wonder if the user would be receptive to verifying themselves with the mods.

edit: their first comment is March 3rd, 2021 and first submission is March 2nd, 2021. Nearly a year and a half after the account was created.

zhengyi13• 5 years ago

Further down thread, there's multiple folk calling out similar disbelief, and stating they've looked at OP's comment history, and saying they believe it's a genuine post by an MD.

SergeAx2• 5 years ago

I haven't check thoroughly, but quick skimming shows nothing beyond informed common sense to me.

kirillzubovsky• 5 years ago

Thank you! There is no way to prove it definitively, but I'd bet this is a writer's account with an agenda.

The whole things reads like an airport novel, adjusted for a specific subject. It's what people who believe about a certain world view expect to see in that world. A tear-jerker for sure, but in practice, for example, I have a lot of anti-vaxxer friends, and even though I don't agree with their choice (but I agree with their choice to have a choice), none of them behave like the people in the story. They are not insane, they just strongly adhere to a certain set of believes.

People would point out to the writer's history, but in fact, their account is only 9 month old, with an average of a few posts per months. It's completely not unreasonable to believe that someone spends this effort to create an illusion of credibility. Heck, I know people with two dozen "active" hacker news accounts, doing the same thing, but in their case so they could promote key tech articles, instead of vaccines.

Internet is a lovely place, isn't it.

AcquirdXpertise• 5 years ago

The human body absorbs 70-90% of Vitamin C taken daily at levels up to 1000mg, at which point absorption falls to 50%, the safe upper limit being 2000mg per day.

As your own source explains, “High intakes of the vitamin are generally well tolerated; a tolerable upper level was recently set at 2g based on gastrointestinal upset that sometimes accompanies excessive intakes.”

The OP’s reference to 100mg daily was evidently a typo; he probably meant 1000mg rather than 100.

FYI: I’m currently taking 1000mg daily on the advice of my primary care physician.

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

I can't help but suspect that this is a larping account https://old.reddit.com/user/thanosrain

This is a two years old account but with only 9 months of activity. (> 1 year old can be sold, see https://www.soar.sh/sell-your-reddit-account/)

No activity in other health related subreddits

All posts are obviously militant and politically linked to topics related to QAnon and anti-vaxxers.

All the posts are generic advice and none of the writings reflect a profound expertise in science nor medicine. Most of the information posted by the author can be found on public government websites and news articles. Having listened to a lot of practicing physicians interviews during the last two years (and having family working in the field) the contrast in deep technical understanding and jargon is clear as day and night. At best he works in a hospital, maybe as a low-tier nurse.

I get it that nurses would quit and find other jobs, but a doctor with "14 years of medical school"?

He says that he worked "many decades" plus 14 years of school. Assuming he went med school at 20 and "many decades" is 3 decades, he would be at least 64 years old. That's very unlikely given Reddit's users demographics (https://www.oberlo.com/blog/reddit-statistics) where users of 65 only constitutes 1% of the user base. Being a militant progressive makes it even more unlikely for the same demographic reasons. If it is two decades or less, than this is not "many decades".

Smoosh• 5 years ago

We did it HN!

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

99% sure this is a made up story.

kxyvr• 5 years ago

I don't know whether or not this particular story is true, but it's within the realm of plausible given what I've heard from my wife who is an ICU physician with a residency in emergency medicine. The last two years have been difficult and these stories come up a lot, so I figure I might as well share some of our experiences.

First, she absolutely has been physically assaulted by a patient as well as family. This is not new to COVID and was more common when she worked in the ER. It's not an every day sort of thing and the hospitals don't put up with patients or family acting violently. However, I believe it's normal for them to have security available for when a patient codes since the families will often act out. Sometimes they're violent. Sometimes they scream. Sometimes they roll on the floor. Sometimes they throw things. Sometimes they don't show up at all and let their family die alone.

Second, patients and families will ask for all sorts of things that don't make sense normally. They will demand a COVID vaccine when they're about to die from COVID. They will demand invermectin. She had one patient that was noncompliant with his oxygen, proning (flipping on the belly), and other treatment who threw a fit, started screaming about how they were trying to kill him, recorded it on video, and posted it on Twitter. She had another patient on the brink of death, unconscious, intubated, pain controlled, that the girlfriend wanted to bring out of sedation, so they could get married because she was worried about their place in the afterlife (yes, there was in fact a theological consult.) She had another one where the family kept trying to feed an intubated patient soup. They will actively accuse you of trying to kill their loved one. This is particularly difficult emotionally because a lot of my wife's life is devoted to helping someone with difficult, long hours. No one likes to be accused of that.

Third, due safety difficulties with patients coming to a COVID filled unit, the ICU physicians started calling the families directly to give them update. Prior to this, it was more common for the nurse to provide updates and then forward questions to the physicians. Generally, this is a good thing, but it's also not particularly easy. Nowadays, the patient families not only question, but try to micromanage all elements of the treatment. For example, there's this new trend where the families will ask to see the vent during a video meeting and then demand changes to the treatment protocol. This is not safe and they are not qualified to make these changes. Now, generally speaking, if the family has questions, my wife is more than willing to answer them. However, trying to walk a family through a treatment protocol which they do not have the necessary background to understand is not particularly easy. Further, she really does not have time to do so either. Any time spent with the family working through the foundation of pulmonary function is time not spent actively working on patients who are quite literally dying. It really is hurting other patients and I believe it to be selfish. And, look, we get that they're worried and they want to be involved, but I don't think people acknowledge the cost of these demands. Time is not free.

As to how someone can better interact with their physician, I think everyone can achieve better results is they focus on what they want their goals and outcomes to be rather than the exact method to get there. For example, in end of life care, there are questions like: Do we do everything to keep them alive? Are we DNR? Are we DNI? These are hard questions, so it's easier to frame them as: What do we want life to look like after our hospital stay? If your goal is to be able to speak with family, hold your kids, and read books, then having the hospital do everything in their power to keep you alive while simultaneously ending up neurologically devastated in an LTAC (long term acute care) probably isn't a good outcome. I can assure you that the medical staff will work harder if you tell them, "Hey, I really appreciate what you're doing for my wife. She's really important to us and this has been really difficult to everyone. Our primary goal is to have her come home in a situation where we can have a conservation together. If that is not possible, we'd really like to be there with her and to have her pass in peace. Please keep us informed if there's anything that we can do to support her or if her status changes." Then, make sure to check in everyday, so that the hospital, nurses, and physician know that the family is involved.

I will also mention to the "this-is-the-new-normal" COVID crowd, it literally can't be. To me, new normal means that we've achieved a new stable point of operating in our everyday lives. However, the hospitals have not reached that point. Physicians, nurses, and other medical staff really are leaving. The units are not fully staffed and they have not been for months. Attrition is high. This affects all of us whether or not you believe in COVID or vaccinations because I can assure you that regardless of ailment, the level of care now is not the same as it was prior to COVID and it is getting worse. Please be safe.

joeman10002• 5 years ago

This is straight-up fiction. Or a conglomerate of seperate incidents combined into one whining piece of hyper-emotional propaganda. Either way, it doesn’t make me feel sorry for anyone. All of the people in the story are dumb, including the ‘doctor’ that can’t deal with family members misplaced anger when faced with immense grief.

blindmute• 5 years ago

I tasted blood from the top of my lip. It took a moment to know it was seeping from my nose, which she had broken. My mask was getting wet, and thus useless.

Come on now

My career of treating patients has ended

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