LIVING WITH MCL

A friend is admitted to the hospital. He was experiencing shortness of breath and chest pains extending down his arms. Obviously the signs of a heart attack or an impending one. Doctors do a complete work up on him. He's diagnosed with mitral valve stenosis and needs a valve replacement [maybe 2]. One problem is his kidneys aren't functioning properly, a possible complication of his diabetes, which is causing some concern to the doctors. Anyways, there's a lot of discussion amongst the doctors, and it's decided his condition isn't urgent. So he's sent home to recover, under a nurse's monitoring, until his kidney function improves, and his condition can be further evaluated. So now that I've set the stage, you can pretty much forget everything I just mentioned, because it's what comes next that is so disturbing. Upon my friend's release, he's prescribed a number of medications, one of which is a blood thinner, Lovenox, although the name of dr...

If you're one of the 27% of Americans defined as having had a serious illness, medical condition, injury, or disability requiring a lot of medical care, or who had been hospitalized overnight in the past 12 months, you probably don't think very highly of it. In a  poll conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NPR, and Harvard School of Public Health , of those 27% of Americans ...... more than 40 percent say that the cost of their medical care over the last 12 months has caused a “very serious” (20%) or “somewhat serious” (23%) problem for their or their family’s finances. ............One in six sick Americans say that there was a time in the past 12 months when they could not get the medical care they needed (17%). Among the sick Americans who could not receive care, 52 percent report that it was because they could not afford the needed care, and 24 percent say it was because their insurers would not pay for it . Lastly, about one in ten sick Americans (11%) report bei...