Note: This article chronicles the near death of my beloved wife Claudia Maria Arevalo-Lowe in February and March of 2003. She survived this illness for another two years, finally passing away from Septic Shock due to diabetes due to the asthma medications required to keep her breathing. You can find out more about Claudia here:
I miss Claudia terribly every single day. She is my best friend and soul-mate. I am surviving and moving on with my life, but there is an emptiness which I pretend isn't there.
In my experience there are some good doctors, nurses and other medical practitioners (pharmacists, technicians and so on). My own personal physician and his staff are some of the best there are. Unfortunately, the occasional glimmer of competence is so vastly outweighed by the massive incompetence (and, in the case of psychiatrists and their ilk, malevolence) of the field as a whole that it's amazing we allow the current state of affairs to continue. Are people so afraid of disease and death that they will grasp at any solution offered by anyone - even the babbling idiots that currently call themselves doctors? Do we, as a group, simply refuse to see not just downright incompetence but the actual maliciousness that exists in one of our most lofty professions? Why do we put medical doctors on such pedestals in light of their constant failures? And why in the world do we tolerate psychiatrists, the group that created Hitler and is responsible for the vast majority of death, destruction and evil in this world? (See Citizens Commission on Human Rights for more information about the evils of psychiatry).
Okay, perhaps I was naive and maybe even a bit stupid. No really. I have an IQ of around 150, yet now I feel just plain idiotic. All of us have a day of reckoning. A day when we learn that something we understood to be true, something obviously real and factual is actually false. The day like the scene in the movie "The Matrix", when Neo is pulled from the simulated world into the real world. Imagine the shock of understanding that comes when one learns that something basic is a lie.
During these past few weeks, I learned how Neo felt when he heard the words "Welcome to the real world".
My world started to change on February 24th, 2003. It was a Monday after a very long weekend, which followed a long and hard week. My wife was having difficulty breathing, her asthma was complicated by what appeared to be an infection in her lungs, and her foot was giving her extreme problems. She had filled with water (a side effect of the drugs used to handle asthma), and this resulted in two huge blisters on her feet.
The weekend was rough but Claudia refused to go to the hospital. By Monday, however, it was obvious that there was not a choice: her breathing problems had gotten to the point where it could not be handled at home by me anymore. Even though the doctor had supplied me with many different options, I had run out of things to do to keep her breathing and functional.
I had a plan: get Claudia down the stairs, into the car, and over to Downey Community Hospital. Our doctor (Alan Frischer), an extraordinarily competent person, would preside over her handling. Since she and I had been going to him for almost a decade, this seemed to be the ideal solution.
Unfortunately, events did not support this plan. At 7:00 am on Monday morning (February 24th), I told Claudia I felt she should go to the hospital. Much to my surprise, she agreed without an argument. Now, Claudia hates hospitals and I suddenly felt a small chill go down my spine. If she was agreeing to go, she felt bad indeed.
I asked her to get ready to go and she started the routine. Normally this requires about fifteen minutes, and she was still not finished over 2 hours later. Her breathing was so bad it was impossible for her to do anything quickly. I finally interrupted Claudia doing her routine and told her we were going now. She agreed and started towards the stairs leading down to the car.
She got to the top of the stairs, looked down then back at me, and said she was not going to make it down. I pointed out that she was going to the hospital and if she couldn't get down under her own power I would have to call 911.
When Claudia, the woman who has told me on more than one occasion that she would divorce me if I called the paramedics for her, said that would be fine, I felt a chill go up and down my spine. Now I knew without a shadow of a doubt that she was very sick. Very sick indeed.
I rushed to the phone and called 911. I had this idea that I could ask the paramedics to come over and ask them to carry her down the stairs to our car. I then thought I could drive my lovely wife down to our hospital so she could be attended by our doctor.
The paramedics arrived in less an three minutes (here in Los Angeles we have an excellent emergency system). I went outside to guide them to our house. I still had this idea that they would simply help me get Claudia down the stairs. Sigh.
Seven men jammed into our apartment and looked my wife over. She was barely conscious, and was having extreme difficulty breathing. I was quickly informed by one of the emergency team members that my plan was unworkable - they had to get Claudia to the closest hospital immediately. If they didn't, then they were afraid that if something happened to Claudia I could sue them (my, how that short, three character word forces so many things to happen). They were going to drive her to the nearest hospital, which was Queen of Angels.
Angels my foot. More like Angels of Lucifer. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I watched as they put a mask on Claudia's face to give her some oxygen. I noticed that her cheeks were a beautiful shade of blue and although conscious she didn't seem very aware of what was going on. The paramedics spent a couple of minutes tying her to a gurney, then carted her out the door, down the stairs and into the ambulance. I jumped in with them, as the hospital is within walking distance and I didn't feel like driving.
I had been with Claudia to the hospital a few times in the past and I knew the drill. Sometimes the hospital will allow the spouse into the emergency and sometimes it won't. This time, the hospital would not allow me to go in with her. I had some things I needed to tell the doctor, but they simply were not interested. I felt I had important information to relay - such as how she got this way, what drugs I had administered and her past medical history, but my attempts to pass this information on were ignored for quite some time. I wondered how the doctors could be making intelligent decisions about what treatments to give her without any information, but there was nothing that I could do.
For example, I thought it might be important for them to know that I had administered, at my doctors orders, an Epipen (this drug, essentially adrenalin, will get an asthmatic breathing again very fast). This would make Claudia's heart race and might make her pulse higher than normal. I also had information about her long medical history that was vital.
After a couple of hours, I was finally allowed to get into the emergency room with my wife. She was unconscious and had a large number of bottles and tubes hanging off her arm (she had a PIK line in her arm already due to taking intravenous antibiotics for an infection). As I gazed down upon her I realized how vulnerable she was and understood how much danger the woman was in at this time.
As far as I could tell, the emergency room doctor was not of much value. He would not talk to me for more than a few minutes, simply telling me she was being moved to ICU in a few hours (as soon as they could get a room). Her condition was very serious. He did tell me that if we had waited a few hours more to get her to the hospital Claudia would not have survived. That was a sobering thought.
I decided it would be a good time to go home for a while. Claudia was going to be moved upstairs to a room, and there was not much that I could do in the meantime. The nurse told me she would be moved within a few hours. Time enough for some badly needed sleep, some food, and some time to recover my composure.
What I hate about the medical profession, especially doctors, is they believe they are gods. That is not what they say, of course, but it is true that they understand they have the power of life and death in their hands. A brain surgeon can make a cut one way and the patient lives, a tenth of an inch to the left and the patient is a vegetable, and another tenth of an inch and the patient dies.
Not only do most doctors seem to believe they are absolutely gods, but they also simply do not care about their patients. Recently I watched a roundtable discussion on television which involved a number of people in or related to the medical profession. On this show, these people debated the ethics of telling the patient this or that, the moral issues they faced and the agony they went through with each illness.
It was absolute bull. In the years that I've been married, my wife has seem perhaps forty doctors and hundreds of nurses and medical technicians. I can honestly say that only two of those doctors really cared about ethics, how my wife felt or had any concern about her once she left their examination room. Only two of those doctors have ever treated her like a human being - to the remainder she was an object, something causing them distress. In fact, I've seen more ethics in the corner butcher than in 95% of the doctors and other medical "professionals" that I've come in contact with.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.