If this is a true emergency…
Please hang up and dial 911. If you are over 50 you’ve heard the preceding message about a thousand times or more. It sounds like common sense, but is it really? Every doctor’s office and every medical facility from sea to shining sea has that message placed number one on its voice recorder ready to greet and to challenge you right after you dial their number. After all very few among us are qualified to know when a medical condition tips over from normal hysteria to a “true emergency.” What’s more, all but the very rich are in for sticker shock when they discover that the typical cost of an emergency from any medical facility will set the caller and/or his or her insurance company back about $35,000. So, are you ready to make a self diagnosis and proclaim a $35,000 raid on your future just because you saw blood in your urine? The nearest appointment when you can see someone who is qualified to make that decision is 14 days into the future. Will an infection somewhere inside your body wait that long before it kills you? Or will it just wait while your body’s own defenses hold it at bay?
You’re stuck between financial death via bankruptcy, or actual death from a killer infection based on your diagnosis arrived at without benefit of a license with which to make it, but from those who can and who conveniently shifted it onto you by all those recordings because they don't want you jamming up their carefully laid plans of being able to retire by age 50 based on projected appointments, obscene fees, and an inflation rate that only they can get away with. You never could reconcile their fees with your minimum wage pay and make any sense out of it. Now you have a so-called common sense decision to make that could truncate your branch on the family tree right where it is. What to do?
While pondering your decision, you suddenly remember an antibiotic prescription from a few years back. You saved it for an emergency. This could be it. You head straight for your medicine collection that now takes up more space in your house than does your clothes. You search and struggle, and—there it is! And it expired…in 2008. Now you have another decision to make: To take or not to take an old prescription. If it works, you’re out of danger. If not, you will have a credible story for St. Peter at the pearly gates and an epitaph for your grave: “He said it was not an emergency.”
Let’s see: Your family doctor referred you to a specialist based on a number on a piece of paper from an obscure laboratory that replaced the old “hands on” physical that your insurance carrier will no longer pay for. After waiting 90 days to see your referrer, he refers you to another specialist based on a new number on another piece of paper produced by an awkward looking lady who ran a test on your abdomen that you were pretty certain she enjoyed more than you did. You have no idea what she was looking for, but you are now pretty sure she found it.
It’s the new guy who won’t see you, at least not until you bring in a list of all your meds that you are taking on an irregular basis because your insurance carrier doesn’t want to pay for any that can be spelled in 12 letters or less. They love those generic drugs that nobody can pronounce or spell. Still, you must because your new referrer who you still have not met wants to see if you can read and write.
So you call your family doctor to get his advice. After three days and seven lost calls because your new phone number is not in his records, you finally hear from his nurse. “What?” she screams. “We asked you to see a specialist last January, and he will not have an answer for us before July at the earliest?” You had to admit her math is right. But your decision algorithm is now telling you that you cannot survive that long. They will bury you about mid June, you tell her, provided your burial insurance will pay during leap years, and you are pretty sure they won’t. Certain that you are now a mental case she advises you to call 911.
