Goodbye Tricia, We Will Miss You

One of the most loving of women died this past Friday. A victim of the "best healthcare in the world". She was sick to her stomach on Friday morning, and felt badly enough to go to our local Emergency Room. Our local hospital has a brand spanking new state of the art Emergency facility where they appear to not understand when someone arrives with a life or death problem.

An opportunity that I will never have would be greatly appreciated by me. An opportunity to ask any of the staff on duty when she was there why, when she was so overweight and with a broken foot, did it not occur to them that they needed to do some tests to determine if she was having a heart attack? Why, in light of her other problems, did it not occur to anyone that she had a blood clot? What part of women having heart attacks seldom show the usual signs of one, escapes you still? 

I would love to ask since she's the third death that I know of in young women who were sent home with stomach aches, when they're going to figure out that they need to do something besides dismiss them? So, because they're overburdened by people without primary care physicians seeking medical care that should be handled by a doctor's office, our family has lost a daughter, sister, niece, aunt and cousin. 

She had a doctor, who like most of our physicians today double book and don't seem able to fit a patient in when they need to be seen. They offer appointments that are so far in the future, whatever ails you will either cure itself or make you worse. Might even die from it, even if you go to a state of the art Emergency Room, where you sit in the waiting room for hours before they see you, and then they send you home to die.

She was my niece. She was 46, and she died while availing herself of the best we have to offer. In a place where she should have gotten help, she was not offered a chance to continue living. She was simply sent home to die.