TGIF??? I think not!

Posted by Sammy on Jan 29th, 2010 | 2 comments

Call me bitter but I’ll never be thankful that its Friday. Friday’s are a reminder of losing my best friend, my husband, Mikey’s daddy. It’s only been 4 Friday’s but my Friday’s always start the same. A BIG sigh that I’m even up at 6am to get up for work. Then another sigh at 6:30 because that’s when my cell rang 4 Friday’s ago. I remember so vividly the feeling I got. My heart pounding like it was about to jump out of my chest. Racing across the pergo in our room hoping to not fall and break my leg while trying to gather some clothes to throw on to race to the hospital. Then waking up everyone I could in the house so that I didn’t go to ICU alone.

I remember getting to the hospital and running the hall to the elevators, then running again from the elevators on the 3rd floor to get to Gary’s room. The lights were all turned on. The curtain pulled. A bunch of people around his bed, performing CPR. I remember the doc coming out at one point to tell me that they’d try for 30 minutes, that was the max. I guess after 30 minutes he’s technically brain dead. As the clock ticked my panic grew and grew.

Now when I look at the clock and its 7:10am on a Friday I remember sitting there in front of his room hearing the doctor call the time. I heard it so vividly. Her voice is one I’ll never be able to forget. I remember sitting there as they came out of his room and the doc came up to me and I let out a scream because I didn’t want to hear what she had to tell me. I knew Gary was gone.

So yeah I’ll never be thankful its Friday. Maybe one day when I’m senile I will be. But right now nope not gonna happen. To top it off I get to go through a weekend and then I get hit by what will be the 1st day of February. I’ll have hit a month without my Gary. One freaking month! It’s still seems to unreal and yet the pain is still so very raw.

My new purpose/passion in life

Posted by Sammy on Jan 21st, 2010 | 2 comments

I think I have found my purpose in life besides the being a loving wife and mother job that I’ll gladly say I’ve done a damn good job at

Besides my passion to help raise as much money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to help bring us that much closer to a cure I’ve recently discovered that I have another passion, being somewhat of a patient advocate. While Gary was going through chemo I quickly learned what kind of healthcare was ideal and what flat out SUCKED. So it should not be a surprise if I tell you that normal healthcare just flat out sucks and definitely NEEDS changing.

Now I won’t be the first person to say that the healthcare plan that the Obama administration is trying to push through sooooooo fast isn’t the solution. I don’t think its that easy to overhaul a poor product. Ok enough of my soapbox political mumbo jumbo, now on to the real purpose of my post.

On two separate occasions when I took Gary to one of the Memorial Healthcare system hospitals we were asked who his primary care physician was when we checked into the ER. This is the norm no matter what ER you go to. Well our primary care physician is associated with the Memorial Healthcare system. He has rights to see patients at these hospitals, for gods sake the guy has an office in one of those hospitals so he better have rights!

Well on both occasions the hospital failed to even notify our primary care physician that Gary was in the ER. On the first trip I had taken Gary because he developed an oncologic fever. They ran cultures on him immediately. I had to call our primary only because the doctor the hospital assigned to Gary refused to release him and wanted to keep him in the hospital for 36 hours until his blood cultures came back. That wasn’t acceptable to us because we had to be on the plane back to the NIH the next day. After getting in touch with the on-call doctor for our primary he met us at the hospital and took over the case and you better believe he got Gary discharged!

On this last trip Gary was once again assigned some doctor that wasn’t associated with his primary doctor. The day after Gary was admitted I saw Gary’s wristband and saw the name of the doctor who wasn’t our primary doc, and immediately told the nurse about it. She said she couldn’t do anything about it. I told the nurse manager, he couldn’t do anything about it. Finally I told THE actual doctor that’s name was on the wristband that I wanted GARY’S primary doc to take over the case and he said he’d talk to them. Ummmmm let’s just say that NEVER happened, NEVER.

What the hell is the point in asking a patient who their primary care physician is if you have no intention on calling them at all. It took ME to call our primary for them to even know that Gary was admitted, that was 3 days after Gary was in the hospital in ICU!!!! It took ME to call our primary for them to even know that Gary was D-E-A-D! In my opinion that is unacceptable. The patient and their family should NOT have to be the ones to deal with this crap. They should just have to worry about being supportive for the patient and getting the patient back to good health.

I just so happened to have an appointment with our primary doctor this morning and I brought this up and she looked over my file and noticed our insurance type and she noticed it was a PPO. She said that’s why they didn’t call them. It’s because with PPO all of the doctors know they’ll get a decent payout from the insurance company so why the hell would they even bother to give the money to MY doctor. Better to keep it in the family right? This pisses me off and you better believe I’ll write a letter and call whomever I need to in order to voice my opinion.

This should not happen EVER, its extremely unacceptable and its not fair to all of the patients out there! You better believe this will not be the last you hear about this topic from me.

And the saga continues

Posted by Sammy on Jan 20th, 2010 | one comment

So today I was bound and determined to get an answer one way or another about this damn death certificate and why the medical examiner wasn’t doing their part. There had to be a reason, and there was a damn good one too! They weren’t happy with the cause of death that the quack of a attending physician put down on the death certificate. I call this asshat a quack because he is one. He was NOT our primary physician at all. The first day Gary was in ICU I met him and told him to his face that he was NOT Gary’s primary physician and I’d appreciate that they notify his primary physician so he can resume Gary’s care. Did that happen? Nope not ever!

Ok regardless back to the death certificate. Dr. Quack (no that’s not his real last name) he wrote the cause of Gary’s death to be “Cardiorespiratory arrest due to multi-organ failures”. NOWHERE did he mention what triggered that. Ummmmm did ya forget that Gary had lymphoma? Or hey that because of recent chemo he had NO immune system and became susceptible to catching anything that could potentially kill him. I can’t believe someone would leave out such an important detail. Do you really think that a medical examiner isn’t going to question a 33yr old man’s death certificate that says what YOU put on it? UGH the frustration!!!!

So yeah once I found that piece of info out and the fact that the medical examiner didn’t want medical records they wanted a doctor to clarify and sign his death certificate AGAIN. They were having a hard time getting ahold of Dr. Quack because he has a freaking 800# and ummmmm the answering service doesn’t do jack shit because the message never gets to the doctor.

So I started calling every doctor in the world that I knew. Finally I got a hold of the medical director at Memorial Miramar Hospital (aka the Hospital of Death in my eyes at least). I told him everything. He promised to call the medical examiner’s office and find out what they need and he promised to get this taken care of. Thirty minutes later he calls me back and tells me that the funeral home is sending someone to meet Dr. Quack to get the death certificate clarified.

I hope to god that this is taken care of come tomorrow morning. I’ll be LIVID and will go postal on someone if it is not done.

I NEED for this part of the grieving process to be over. I NEED to know that Gary’s body is not sitting in some storage place awaiting the inevitable. I NEED to begin closure.