It can be exhausting how the medical system treats the elderly with callous disregard sometimes. It isn’t even always deliberate, and the doctors or nurses think they are acting for the better good of the elderly person, but that’s not how it feels. Here’s yet another example: Because my father takes a steroid for his rheumatoid arthritis, he has to get blood tests every few months. That's how we discovered that he’s anemic. He needs to take iron pills, but he also he needed a colonoscopy and endoscopy to see if the cause of the anemia was something in his stomach or intestines.
So, I took him to a gastroenterologist (GI) who examined him and ruled out a few things. This GI doctor is part of a group owned and run by the Cooper University Medical System. He agreed with Dad’s family doctor that the tests needed to be done. We made arrangements with his staff, who told us the tests would be done at the outpatient surgical center next door to the GI doctor's office. They wrote down the date on top of the instructions for prepping for the tests and told us someone would call the afternoon before to tell us what time to be there. The day before, Dad did everything they said to do, which meant not eating anything, drinking lots of water, and, of course, drinking the laxative, etc. If you have ever had a colonoscopy, you know how bad that prep is. It's harder for a 96-year-old man who can't move quickly. He was stuck in his room, where he could lie on his bed and wait for the next run to the bathroom a few feet away.
I had to teach that day, so I was gone until evening. (I recently started teaching again, part-time.) When I got home, I discovered that no one had called to inform us of when to be there for the procedures. I tried calling the doctor's office and the hospital that owns the office and surgery center. They were closed for the day. I finally contacted the doctor on call for the office. His answering service spoke to him.
“He said he doesn't know why they didn't call,” the operator said. “He said to just call the surgical center at 7:30 in the morning.”
“Do you have the number?” I asked.
“No,” she said. She looked for it, but finally admitted she couldn't find it. Neither of us could find that number even online. It was not part of the information packet they had given us, either. Finally, she said, “Call the main hospital number in the morning. They do the scheduling for all the offices and centers. I'm putting lots of notes in the system so they can see what's going on, but I don't know when they'll see them.”
I thanked her and hung up. I had a bad feeling my father was about to get screwed over by the medical system once again, and I was right.
At 7:30 a.m. I called the main hospital number and spoke to the woman in charge of scheduling procedures. She had already read over the answering service operator's messages and done some research. To be fair, she was efficient and as helpful as she could be. She was very apologetic, but explained: “It looks like one of the doctors, probably the anesthesiologist, decided that your father needs to get the procedures done in a hospital instead of in the surgical center. He decided they can’t do it there. One of the nurses was supposed to notify you.”
I was furious. “Well, they didn’t. No one notified us. My father went through all of the prep yesterday. Do you understand what that is like for a 96- year-old? This is cruel negligence. And why? Because of his age? Why didn’t they say something when we there in the office? Why didn’t the doctor we saw think that was an issue? I’m not putting him through this again. My next call is going to be to a lawyer.”
We would have been fine with going to a hospital, but no one told us anything. They let us continue to think Dad’s procedures would be at the surgical center on the day they originally scheduled it, instead of calling to re-schedule.
The woman said, “I’m sorry. I’m not in clinical. I just schedule people. I already have the person who schedules these for the hospital looking to see if we can get him into either our Camden hospital or the Cape May Court House hospital. Can you guys drive to Camden?”
“Camden?? That’s at least an hour and fifteen minutes away.” I may have screeched when I said it. All I knew of Camden were tales that it was a wasteland to be avoided at all costs even though the Catholic diocese that ran our church and school was headquartered there.
“Let me call you back,” she said. When she called back, she said, “Camden’s the only place we can get you in; I’m sorry. If you can be there at 11:30 am, we can do the procedures today.”
I conceded because he needed those procedures done, and I didn’t want him to have to go through the whole prep torture again, so that’s where we ended up.
Though I grew up in New Jersey, spent much of my life here, and spent a lot of time in Philadelphia for various reasons, I had never been to Camden City, NJ, before this. I realize the city has gone through revitalization and is different now than it was when I was growing up and heard bad stories about it, but I still think of Camden as someplace unsafe, the wrong side of the freeway before Philadelphia, the side that was abandoned to the mercies of poverty, gangs, and violence. In truth, the city has a lot of important history in terms of the Industrial Revolution, but it was abandoned by the big factories, and its economic boom turned into an economic bust. The Cooper hospital system is helping transform the city, now, and I was pleasantly surprised by the section we drove through to get to the hospital. It was an interesting mix of old buildings that were still in good shape and modern hospital buildings. That area looked safe, full of diversity and promise.
We had to wait an hour and a half before they took him in to get the tests done, but eventually my father had his colonoscopy and endoscopy, and recovered well from it. An orderly pushed him in a wheelchair out of the hospital to an area in front of the building where we could sit and wait for the valet service to bring my car. (That was just as expensive as parking it myself, but faster.) As we passed through the front doors where the valet service desk is, we overheard a security guard tell a small group of the valet staff: “We apprehended the guy, so you don’t have to worry. He stole the tip jar from Starbucks, and they’re definitely pressing charges.” There’s a Starbucks in the lobby of the main hospital building.
My dad, who hadn’t heard anything because he refuses to wear hearing aids, said, “This is a huge hospital.”
The orderly said, “Yep, and it keeps getting bigger. It’s changed this whole area. I grew up around here. Used to be, you couldn’t walk around here at night. It wasn’t safe, and there weren’t many jobs, especially for us.” [He’s African American.] “Now it’s very safe and lots of jobs. That guy who stole from Starbucks is an unusual thing. We don’t see that kind of thing much anymore. He passed right by me earlier on his bike. I saw the security guys go after him. Glad they caught him.”
One of the valet staff drove my car up. The orderly helped my dad into the car and waved goodbye. “Hope you feel better,” he said, walking off, waving to someone ahead of him.