It’s 4 a.m. as I write this from my hospital bed where I have spent the past 11 days. I woke up with hives again — part of a syndrome that may or may not be linked to the cancer I am being treated for. This syndrome is also causing pressure bruises all over my body. The hives cause my feet and hands to swell and bruise and then get hard. They are still testing for the cause.
I called for the night nurse, Martha, an older Nigerian woman who just wants to help me. But the order for Benadryl — an OTC medicine any child could go buy at Rite Aid or CVS or Walgreens — was taken out of my chart by the officious bean counter who began covering my case Monday. So now the nurse has had to message the attending, who may or may not respond.
An hour passes
Fast forward to 5 a.m. I ring for Martha again. She tells me to call for the supervisor because the doctor is not responding and she has messaged them several times. In that hour, my feet and right hand have doubled in size and my thighs are both swollen as is my lower back. This all could have been mitigated an hour earlier with a simple antihistamine.
Could have. Didn’t.
I am now both angry and crying. “What can I do to make this happen?” I ask Martha who hands me the house phone. I dial the number, telling them it’s an emergency and they say the supervisor will be right up.
The supervisor does not come up and so Martha calls rapid response. Within minutes, I have an attending physician, an intern, the charge nurse, Camilla, and her trainee, because Camilla must document the event because Martha had to first notify her in hopes she could order the Benadryl.
Also in the room is Rebecca, the lovely aide who first got Martha to help me, who is taking my vitals and my blood sugar (I guess that is Benadryl-related, but that finger stick hurt like hell and made me feel sorry for every diabetic in America).
Life-threatening time lapse
There are the same number of people in my room now as would be for a code, if I were dying. Which I said, “I could have gotten someone to walk to the 24-hour CVS and this would have happened faster. It’s Benadryl. And this room looks like a code was called.” They tell me that is essentially what happened.
Meanwhile, it is 5:45 a.m. and the hives have progressed to bruising and swelling. It’s a huge setback in my recovery. The pain is massive and unnecessary. It is two hours after I first called for Martha before I finally get the Benadryl.
Two hours. Good thing it wasn’t a peanut allergy or I’d be dead.
There is no critical care
I am on the step-down unit from ICU. It is critical care. Everyone is hooked up to telemetry to have their heart monitored 24/7.
I wish I could say that the Benadryl incident was an anomalous event in my stay. It was not. While my life was saved the day I was rushed here with apparently no electrolytes left in my system and my heart in failure, it has been a constant battle between me — a journalist who has covered medical issues since the 1980s when I was the first woman AIDS reporter in the country — and the broken healthcare system we are all forced to live under in this wealthy nation that spends more on healthcare per capita than any other on earth.
Every day, even when I have been at my sickest, I have had to fight for appropriate care, for appropriate food for my life-long vegetarian diet, for my own medication instead of the hospital’s meds. I have had to file a formal complaint about the ratio of nurses to patients on my critical-care floor because it leads to situations that are life-threatening for patients and puts nurses under extreme stress.
Mostly though I have had to wait and wait and wait some more.
Post-COVID healthcare
COVID broke our already collapsing healthcare system. Nurses and aides and other support staff quit, burned out from the crisis and the massive dying. The collective amnesia affecting the U.S. with regard to COVID is hard to fathom. How could people forget the refrigeration trucks full of dead bodies lined up outside hospitals because the morgues were full?
And yet Donald Trump’s campaign for president tells people they were better off four years ago when the U.S. led the world in COVID deaths. Four years ago ,Trump orchestrated a mass casualty event by failing to warn the public or follow rules set by Dr. Anthony Fauci and others on his infectious disease team about COVID. Even after he himself nearly died from the disease and had to be air-lifted to the hospital.
But as nurses have told me — including one who lost her husband to COVID even as she was seeing patients — in this hospital, healthcare has changed since COVID.
“It’s just not the same,” one nurse told me. “We just don’t have enough people, or support staff or supplies. We need more of everything.”
What happened to prioritizing healthcare?
In the first two years of the pandemic, I won a half dozen journalism awards including from the Society of Professional Journalists for my COVID coverage. But while I was reporting on this devastating pandemic, a schism was occuring in the U.S. over COVID programs that President Joe Biden had initiated and the conspiracy theorists thought was dangerous.
Joe Biden and 25 other Democrats ran for president in 2020 with healthcare as their top priority. What happened to that? How did immigration, which impacts very few Americans despite what Trump, Vance and the GOP say, get switched out for healthcare, which impacts every American?
Fear is the answer: The Democrats ran on saving lives in 2020 while the GOP ran on fear. The ads Trump-Vance and their PACS are running call Kamala Harris dangerous. They are in visual tones that equate her color with that of criminals. They show her laughing out of context implying that she could not care less about your fears of criminal migrants.
But what we really should fear is getting sick in America. Of being in a hospital with burned-out over-extended and underpaid staff who were never given any of the promises that they were told by pro-union Democrats would happen once they were back in the White House.
It’s easy to say Biden-Harris did great work regarding the pandemic once they took office because they did. But then it stopped. All the healthcare initiatives both candidates ran on and have championed have yet to be realized.
Meanwhile, the GOP has changed the narrative. They have erased what happened when Donald Trump was the pandemic president and a million Americans died and millions more were disabled by Long COVID.
Democrats must remind voters of what Trump did to them and the people they loved, many of whom died alone in isolation.
Health care is a pivotal issue for all Americans but it is a dominant one for LGBTQ+ people and Black women and other marginalized communities. Kamala Harris has long been a champion of women’s and LGBTQ+ health concerns. She must remind voters that for nearly four years, she and President Biden have been working for our nation’s health. And that the GOP wants to limit access to healthcare and monger fear instead.
