I just got back from Florida, where I witnessed first hand the sorry state of the country’s health care system.

My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, and underwent major surgery for it. I flew down to Florida to be with her, and was shocked at how little care went into managing her pain. Imagine opening your chest, cutting through muscle and lung tissue, leaving tubes and pumps in place – literally gaping holes in your torso with hoses attached to let the chest cavity drain – and then not giving you adequate medication for the pain. That, in a nutshell, is how things went.

When I saw her after surgery she was being moved from ICU and could barely speak. She couldn’t move. The surgeon had told her “we got it all” shortly after surgery, and promptly left for the weekend. My mother is a strong woman with a high tolerance for pain. To see her twitching and grimacing in agony as a nurse bumped the hospital bed by accident shook my dad and me to the core.

I truly wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t been there to complain about her pain management; if they had stuck with the minimum dosage of Loritab, instead of trying different remedies? It took 4 days to finally find something that worked. One of the night nurses actually said to my mother “well, you would receive better care if you had paid for an independent care nurse.”

Excuse me?

This is 2008. I read about nerve blocks and new and different pain meds all the time, and we have to beg for morphine, so my mother can dull the pain enough to reposition herself in her bed without crying out? I almost wanted to ask for a bottle of whiskey and some strap leather for her to chew on, with Wild West medicine like this still being practiced.

This isn’t an indictment of every hospital, by any means. There are wonderful institutions everywhere that provide excellent care, and there were two nurses at this Florida hospital who actually did help get my mom’s pain finally under control. I think more than anything my mother’s case demonstrates how horrible the night and weekend staffs at this particular hospital are, and how much better off my mother indeed would have been if she was a person of means, able to pay for “independent care.”

Thankfully, by Monday her pain was manageable. Through trial and error we found Demerol injections to be effective, and she went home Tuesday with a prescription for Percocet, which was almost as good. She’s moving around now and able to walk, a far cry from the state she was in on Saturday.

What topped it all off for me was when we spoke with the surgeon’s assistant on Monday for a follow-up. When I complained about it taking 4 full days to manage my mom’s pain, she said “yeah, that smarts, huh?”

No sympathy for the torture my mother went through, no explanation for why it took so long to find something that worked.

“That smarts.”

Yes, and it’s really hot in hell, too.

–Brian