Mourning Thoughts

This weekend would have been my friend Sooz's 66th birthday. She missed it by four months. She lived long enough to be eligible for Medicare, but that may be part of the problem. In the months between her 65th birthday and her death, the care she received became less comprehensible than ever before, and she had been through some incredibly bad crap already.

At the outset, she was a Kaiser patient. Her female doctor could barely stand to be in the same room with her, because Sooz smoked. Because Sooz smoked, that particular doctor gave up on her before they really began. She did not send her for tests or schedule a colonoscopy when Sooz complained of intestinal pain. A year went by before, as insured under another agency, Sooz went for a colonoscopy, which could not be completed because of tumors. For want of a test, a life was lost. . .

The cancer was misdiagnosed and, consequently, mistreated. After the tumors shrank enough to determine where they were located, it was too late to eradicate them in situ. And so they spread. And spread. And she did radiation and chemo and more and the radiation burned her chest.

When she died, she was eating through a tube and breathing with the help of a machine. Her cat was terrified by the sound of the machine and wouldn't come near her. She couldn't converse or verbally make her wishes known because the operation to insert the breathing tube had gone awry, canceling her ability to speak. And she couldn't think, really, in the roar and drama of life-sustaining machines and the stately dance of revolving caregivers, so she waited until the wee predawn hours and pulled out the breathing tube and left us.

There is nothing to do with this information except try like crazy to avoid placing one's faith in Western medicine and hospital care. Sooz was my heart sister and I thought we would get old and even more sarcastic together. I want to do something for her, about her, this weekend but it's not clear what that should be. Yet.