Emad Barsoum writes: Healthcare… Where to!

Every day we hear about or experience the deterioration of the Healthcare system, the pride of our nation. We have personal experience with its weakness or maybe heard about it from friends, family, or colleagues.

The following are three events of a firsthand and close encounter experience, which provide a closer look at the system rather than circling stories. These events are also just the tip of the iceberg. However, it is imperative to acknowledge here the extraordinary efforts and dedication of most healthcare providers who are maintaining the well-being of people. On the other side, to present a non-biased opinion or facts, we must admit that many healthcare system users are abusing it and depriving others of severe and urgent needs.

Scene One

A dog bit a teenage girl in her face, mainly her nose, which was pierced in many locations by the canines of this dog was rushed to the ER of a big hospital with an intense amount of bleeding and damage to her nose in addition to the pain. After following the procedures for admission, no attempt was made to give her a painkiller or stop the bleeding. Two hours later, her father made a decent and civilized attempt to approach the nurse counter to urge receiving attention to his daughter, a nurse who seemed to be in charge turned her head towards him and, in a firm, ruthless, and cold voice, she said, “everyone is in pain here”!. The father confirmed that he understood that, please give her a painkiller, we can wait longer, but please stop my daughter’s pain, he added. However, the nurse turned her face away from him and kept following what she was doing. After four hours of pain and bleeding, a doctor looked at the young girl, who was already in trauma, thinking about how her face would be after such an accident.

Scene two:

A man in his fifties rushed to the ER at 8:00 pm with severe renal colic due to a kidney stone. The pain was beyond tolerance even after all the painkillers he had taken since he is familiar with this symptom due to precedent cases throughout his life. However, the pain cannot be handled in rare conditions without receiving Morphine. After two hours of screaming from pain in the waiting area of the ER and crawling on the floor, begging the nurses to have mercy and just give him anything to stop this torture, they reluctantly responded with lots of disguises. By 3:00 am, the resident doctor saw him and advised that there was nothing and that he had to visit his family doctor and take it from there. Two days later, the case was diagnosed as a stone that had blocked the ureter causing back pressure on the kidney, which is an extremely serious condition, and he was immediately rushed for surgery.

Scene three

A lady in her fifties rushed to ER suffering from intense abdominal pain and kept waiting for twelve hours. They sent her home without a final diagnosis or waiting for tests and imaging results. The next day the pain became tenser, went again to the ER. Later in a few hours, she was diagnosed by appendicitis but was taken to the operating room after a long time, although such cases are known in the medicine to be extremely serious, especially after a long time elapsed since the pain started. She had the surgery, which usually lets patients leave the hospital on the same day or the next. Nevertheless, as this article is being written, she is still in the hospital for over a week now with so many complications and undergoing other surgeries due to delays in taking care of her urgent condition.

There are much more events that we can refer to, even though some of them have ended tragically. Still, those are the writer's experiences as a witness and from a personal experience.

Please save our pride, our human dignity, and well-being.