# Broomstick's Husband Is In the Hospital **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 27, 2013, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/broomsticks-husband-is-in-the-hospital/669791 "2013-09-27T11:40:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 32
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2013, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/broomsticks-husband-is-in-the-hospital/669791/32 "2013-09-28T02:33:31Z")
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. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/broomsticks-husband-is-in-the-hospital/669791)._