Note: I wrote this while my wife Claudia was still alive. She died of complications from smoking, and her story is told in It’s My Body and I’ll Do What I Want With It.
Mixed feelings about doctors
I have extremely mixed feelings about doctors. Sometimes you find a good one and then you get your ailments handled. Most of the time, though, it seems to me that we pay a whole lot of money for worthless or even harmful treatments.
I’m not doubting the sincerity of medical professionals. I think that to do what they do at all, any medical professional must want to help his or her fellow beings. And contrary to popular belief, there’s not that much money in the field once you factor in the tremendous education that all doctors and nurses must go through. In other words, it’s not just money, because people can make a lot more money a lot easier without having to look at so much suffering elsewhere.
I’ll say that doctors are excellent when you have something which matches what they expect. But my experiences with my wife’s asthma and visits to dozens of doctors doesn’t give me a high opinion. Many times their treatments made her condition worse, and the doctors never, with only one exception, advised her of adverse side effects of some of the asthma medication. In fact, when she did suffer from the effects she was misdiagnosed with something else and the doctors attempted to treat that.
The one exception was our current doctor, who’s one of the most competent men ever to grace the medical profession.
Only that one doctor pointed out to my wife that environmental conditions such as dust cause asthma. Only that one doctor recognized the symptoms of prednisone over the long term and proceeded to get my wife off the drug.
Other doctors had her taking three to four adrenalin shots per week. One had her on 60mg of prednisone every day. None of them mentioned, not even our good one, that we could buy our own nebulizer. We’d to figure that out on our own. One doctor even had the gall to tell the woman who was purple and having extreme difficulty breathing to stop faking it, that she didn’t have asthma.
I’d to stop her from killing him, by the way, and the adrenalin rush did stop her asthma that time. I’ve never in my life seen my wife so angry.
The pain nobody could find
When my wife was suffering from pain in her side so severe that she’d cry, not a single doctor, out of dozens, could help. Their cure was pain drugs, so many of them that it almost killed my wife. Dozens of highly intrusive tests as well as four unneeded operations to remove non-existent kidney stones. More pain drugs, eight Vicodin extra strength per day, then switching to even stronger pain medication at triple prescriptions.
Finally, one doctor decided that my wife needed her intestines removed because her bowels had stopped working. She hadn’t gone to the bathroom in weeks.
We recovered our intelligence at that point and told the doctor where to go. Shortly thereafter, my wife went into a five day coma. The doctors in the hospital never determined the reason and sent her home with no follow-up treatment of any kind. Later analysis of the tests she took in the hospital, which I sent to other specialists myself, resulted in the conclusion that severe kidney problems caused her coma, along with a contribution by the pain drugs.
It’s interesting that the hospital couldn’t figure this out, yet charged our insurance company over $80,000 for the stay.
At this time, I took her off all pain medication at the insistence of our good doctor. My wife went through three months of hell. Her legs hurt so bad that we’d to rub in extra strength menthol crème every couple of hours. Her skin crawled and she’d dozens of other interesting symptoms.
Shortly before her coma I noticed my wife was constantly holding her side. I asked why, and she told me it made the pain better. I asked if I could press there myself, and I did so. Magically, the pain went away. Discussion with a chiropractor produced the opinion that one of her ribs and a nerve were pinching.
Now if she’s this pain I just press that magical spot and it’s gone. No drugs and no medical tests. And now her bowels, the ones that were going to be removed, work fine. Interesting that the doctors, who knew of her Vicodin dosage, didn’t figure out that a side effect of that drug is constipation.
So if you wonder why I’m a little down on the medical profession, I hope this clears it up. Their cures came within a hair’s breadth of killing the love of my life on more than one occasion, and not one of them, not even the good one, could give any kind of real treatment that worked for any of her conditions.
What actually worked
What has worked? Remove dust from her environment. Keep a nebulizer at home. Give her shots of kenalog, a better steroid than prednisone, when her asthma gets very bad. Some daily asthma drugs, non-steroid, to help keep the asthma more under control. Of course, I press on her side when the pain returns, and she takes lots of vitamins, minerals and specialized herbs.
And, of course, we stay away from doctors.
Related: The Worst Month of My Life, Part 1 and Good Lungs: How Smoking Killed My Wife.