On Wednesday, it marked the 3 month mark of my gram passing, and actually the 3 month mark fell on the same day of the week. I’ll refrain myself from using “13 weeks” as “13” was not her lucky number.
How do I feel? How could someone feel after seeing how sucky the American health care system functions? Because she was just a couple weeks shy of her 83rd that meant “she lived a good life, so therefore we must just indirectly cut the cord to her life?” how being at a hospital is worse than a psych ward, where there is little autonomy? Where I am pissed off for her that she was unable to meet an agreed promise to have a brunch out? I was slightly inconvenienced for the week of August 7th, but I figured maybe in September, well that never happened! She felt bad for the couple weeks that followed.
These people did a number to her life, and in this fucked up world, where having any sympathy for the patient must be damned, because we must have an ultra professional level of sadistic and sociopathic doctors helping write off the most vulnerable. To prevent me from coming off xenophobic, many of these doctors, or even lab techs do not have Western cultures, or even respect them. Then you have trashy white chicks who drop f-bombs right in front of my grandmother, and they only apologize because they were caught, in a Catholic [in name only] hospital mind you.
The American hospital system incentives you to be always sick so they can make “money”. My grandmother didn’t have the most ideal diet early on, and she had a near death health incident in the early 90s that lead her into her present day decline. In 2013, she had another health scare, near death incident.
My mother is going through guilt, but no matter how much it gets parsed or gets unpacked, there is always a “context” that no one else gets but my mother. My mother has not gotten any help, from what I can tell, and I’m kinda alone myself in many ways.
I don’t care what the docs say about her old age, I go so far to say it’s agist. She should be here for Christmas, there is no medical reason to say she couldn’t, other than hack specialists, with allalboutism, and their narrow minded approach to the body, ultimately killed her. Specialists, have actually taken the body apart and threw various organs into silos. And neither specialists really work together, or understand my gram’s unique body, where it took and rejected various medicines for various ailments often working against what the label or the intention of the treatment.
Doctors look at screens and paper, and never the patient or even poke them. While I can’t speak for the dead, or they were alive, I would never speak for them, but I think this death could’ve gone differently if doctors had their shit together.
I am carrying some guilt too. I had learned the hospice route very unexpectedly, and I wished I could’ve done a better job at reassuring my grandmother that the next stage of her life wouldn’t be as scary as she claimed, through her limited communication near the end.
The system is so broken, I actually want to stay away from a hospital as much as I can because I can’t trust it.