Health insurance? Who protects us from doctors who just don’t care?
Allen in "I Got Sick and Then I Got Better" (Photo by Joan Marcus)
“I don’t want you to worry about this,” the radiologist told me. “I can almost guarantee you that you will be fine.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “Dr. S is worried. You know how he is.”
She looked at me intently. “Yes. He is an exceptionally caring physician.”
And “exceptional” is apparently what it takes. The doctor in question has spotted three tumors, all proving to be blessedly benign. If I came to him with even the vaguest complaint, he would take it seriously.
Not so for two women I know, who told their gynecologists of odd stomach pains, only to be dismissed. (“It’s just menopause,” diagnosed one doctor.) With excellent health insurance–these tests cost money, after all– both ended up, months later, undergoing chemo. Twenty years since SNL star Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer at age 46, following 10 months of medical miscalculations, it still takes months, even years, to get the right diagnosis.
Now comes journalist Jennifer Allen and her very witty, very disturbing Off-Broadway show, I Got Sick and Then I Got Better, about her own battle with cancer….which began with asking/begging/screaming for a reason for her pain. In this one-woman play, directed by Tony winner James Lapine and co-director Darren Katz, she takes us through her alarming journey.
It was 18 months before Allen, wife of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and mother of two daughters, was told she had an endometrial tumor. Relieved finally to have an answer, she immediately called her internist, leaving the message: “I have something important to tell you.” He never returned her call.
She ended up at New York’s Sloan-Kettering, one of the best cancer treatment centers in the country, with Dr. G, a woman so mean, Allen calls her “a brunette Ann Coulter.” Dr. G sits reading her emails in the operating room, ignoring patient Allen on the table behind her. Surgery complete, she reports without fanfare: Allen has two tumors, endometrial and ovarian.
What??? Onstage, her confusion is terrifying. How can you go into surgery for one disease and come out with two?
It gets worse, though, as Dr. G, promising biopsy results in 5 to 7 days, disappears to Florida (where Allen imagines she has run off with a nice urologist); her office claims not to know when she will be back. Finally, after 19 days, Allen is given her results.
From then on, Allen describes her life as a TV movie, the kind of movie “you’d see on the Oxygen channel.” She relaxes in chemo, “the perfect position to get a pedicure,” then spends a ridiculous week at a raw foods detox center, where her disease is labeled “a health opportunity,” the drink of choice smells like baby spit-up, and she is expected to give herself an enema every day. (Allen responds by sneaking out at enema time, taking a $50 cab ride to drink hot tea and eat salmon.)
She suffers through chemo brain, fights with her husband and teen, and endures the well-meaning cliches of friends (“Everything happens for a reason…”). One of Allen’s funniest bits involves the many different meanings behind “You look great!” And when told, “You are never given more than you can handle,” she balks: “No! People are given more than they can handle all the time. That’s why they jump out of windows. Or become Scientologists.”
Allen, clearly, finds her handle in humor, and her show, Thursdays through Sundays at The New York Theater Workshop’s 4th Street Theatre, is well worth catching.
But if this woman, with all her intelligence, connections and resources, with the ability to pay for any test needed, had to fight so hard to get answers, and was so often and quickly dismissed, what hope is there for the average citizen?
You can give Americans health insurance, but you cannot insure proper care…a point made terrifying clear in a Newsweek report this week, What You Don’t Know Might Kill You.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mary Hart and Tweets Tube, Jessica Williams. Jessica Williams said: Susan Toepfer – The Bumpy Ride – Health insurance? Who protects us …: With excellent health insurance–these t.. http://bit.ly/4gpFVs [...]
Great story; scary story. My mom has survived more than three bouts with three kinds of cancer, all within Canada’s healthcare system. She was living in Ontario and B.C. at the time — had she been living in Newfoundland (as a newspaper series discovered), her outcomes might have been much worse.
In the U.S., I’ve discovered, you have to be a ferocious and determined advocate for yourself with physicians, and especially if you are female.
Caitlin, I’ve thought a lot about whether women, in particular, are dismissed when they complain. It does seem so…a bit of the “hysterical women” throwback?..but even more alarming is that female doctors appear to be equally bone-headed in ignoring potentially dangerous symptoms in their female patients. I wonder if this seemingly willful disregard could be traced to the medical educational system.
In response to another comment. See in context »Terrible story, terrible for the patient that is. It occurred to me while reading that perhaps when the (high-) profit motive is taken out of health care, we’ll be left with physicians and other health care providers who are in the profession because they care about healing, and not about getting rich.
Rockyinlaw, I don’t think the problem is that doctors are in it for profit–it takes years to make back what they invest in medical school. (And if you were in it for profit, you’d probably be a dermatologist or plastic surgeon.) But some switch is off in their brains when many listen to patients–or don’t listen, as the case may be.
I particularly don’t understand, in the case of ovarian cancer, which has been widely publicized as difficult to diagnose, doctors don’t follow through with tests for even vague complaints that fit into the pattern.
In response to another comment. See in context »The statistics seem to belie whatever altruistic motives a person may have had to become a physician in this country (see some quoted below). P.S. Just three quick points in response to your comment:
(1) “Women’s” problems have never been a high priority in the medical profession, except as related to the removal of uniquely female organs or in ref to their belief in women’s penchant for “hysteria.”
(2) One more story from the 44K of a doc who refused care to a dying person because of lack of med insurance — and the doc gets away scot free. Just amazes me.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/22/without-insurance-mans-de_n_330635.html
(3) Finally, you suggest the cost of a medical education and related loans prove docs are not in it for profit. Of course, that leaves all the middle age docs to explain why they must charge $350 and up per 10 minute visit. Not for profit? See statistics below from http://www.healthguideusa.org/careers/physician_earnings.htm
Median compensation for salaried MDs (not those who own their own practices, thereby earning even more), after ONE year in speciality, 2005:
Anesthesiology, $321,686
General surgery, $282,348
OB/GYN, $247,348
General, internal medicine, $166,420
Family practice (no ob), $156,010
“Earnings of physicians and surgeons are among the highest of ANY occupation. … ”
– Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2008-09 Edition
In response to another comment. See in context »Well, I’m sure they do want to make money, though cynical as I am, even I can’t believe that’s the primary motive. It seems there are easier routes to making money.
As for treating women’s problems, I do agree on that: Only recently have women even begun to be studied separately; the research has been on men, which is why we’re so far behind.
In response to another comment. See in context »