Well, went to see him. We’re both tired but he’s starting to get some color back and they keep sending more food his way to get him to eat.
I was a bit alarmed to see he was on vancomycin, they usually save that for drug-resistant bugs.
I did get snappish with the nurse. She was getting scoldly about him re-using catheters and going on about how he needs to use a new one every time… I’m sorry, it’s been a long day at work, I had to deal with a workplace bully who thought today would be a really good time to jack me around, and now this nurse is scolding us.
Well, here’s the math: a new catheter every time is $5 each time (this has somewhat to do with the catheter he needs to use, which MUST be latex free because he has an allergy to that). At least four a day. That’s $20 a day, $140 a week (that’s more than our weekly food budget, by the way) and $600 a month (which, by the way, is more than our rent+utilities). We are poor. Officially so. We literally can not afford to do that, we just don’t have the money. She then started in with “Medicare pays for a couple hundred catheters a month…” I pointed out we don’t have Medicare. That’s not our insurance. And we can NOT find a place that will accept our insurance for those catheters he needs. We don’t re-use them because we’re stupid, it’s because we really don’t have a choice.
And the light bulb goes off over her head. Yes, this is a really stupid way to run things because, just two days into this hospital stay it’s already cost tens of thousands of dollars to treat this. He’s going to be in until at least Monday, so the money keeps adding up.
Which is just another example of our jack-up health care “system” that we can get covered for tens of thousands for an emergency hospital stay but when it comes to preventing it with something as simple as a sterile piece of plastic we’re kicked to the curb.
Which sounds really pissed off but yeah, I am.