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May 19, 2009
medicine from hell
Sarah is a security guard at the Verizon building where I am working. Always friendly, she operates at the front desk and holds down the fort.
She was rubbing her eyes as I was walking out of the building today; I asked her if she was feeling tired. Not quite, she said. The doctor gave her a bad prescription. The drops were supposed to soothe her eye, but she felt like a piece of gravel was lodged behind it. Her sinuses were inflamed - maybe an allergic reaction, she thought. She spoke of a time where she walked into a doctor's office where everything was untidy and unclean. She told the doctor that she had pain in her stomach, and he asked her if she needed a blood test. She said she didn't know, he was the doctor. When he offered her 5 possible medicines, saying to take them one at a time until the pain went away, she promptly dismissed herself. Although Sarah herself immigrated from Ethiopia, she has negative feelings toward foreign doctors, lamenting that they are incompetent. More and more, she notes, medical standards have been compromised. Sarah was further upset by the fact that an Ethiopian friend, who, like her, had little support or voice in the U.S., was not only misdiagnosed but decisively mistreated. The doctors deemed throat surgery the proper remedy to profuse bleeding from the mouth. After his immediate death, the coroner discovered that he had leukemia. And, sure enough, the antibiotics that he had been prescribed the day before triggered the bleeding.
Posted by dmbenn at May 19, 2009 10:14 PM