My wife and I spent yesterday at Brenner Children's Hospital in Winston-Salem with our youngest son. Our son has been dealing with a condition called supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), which in layman's terms means his heart will sometimes beat really fast - like 200 beats-per-minute fast - for extended periods of time even if he's sitting still. He was in the hospital for a procedure called a cardiac ablation which, if successful, would prevent these episodes from happening in the future.
The way the ablation was explained to us is that the doctor would send catheters through major veins in the legs to our son's heart and, depending on where in the heart the problem was, either burn or freeze the part of the heart that was causing it to go into this abnormal rhythm. Our son would be put under general anesthesia for the procedure and it would likely take about four hours. They would provoke his heart into going "wonky" (that's our technical term for it), identify the problem area, treat it and then observe it for a period of time to make sure they got all of it. If they needed to they'd freeze or burn more spots until they had the problem area taken care of.
Here's the really amazing part: if all went as planned we'd have our son back home the same day and he'd be under orders to take it easy for four days, not lift anything heavy for about a week, and then he'd be back to normal. To us this was truly a miracle of modern medicine - our son would have a heart procedure as outpatient surgery!
Thankfully all went as planned and we had our son home last night. Truly amazing.
Unfortunately modern medicine also has its limitations. While we were in the waiting room during our son's surgery a doctor came out and met with a mother and grandmother waiting near us. It was very early in the morning and most of the folks in the waiting area were asleep, thus it was pretty quiet. We tried our best not to eavesdrop, but it was impossible not to hear pieces of what the doctor was telling the mother - that her child did indeed have some rare, malignant cancer. It was also impossible not to hear the mother's crying and her mother trying to console her. And quite frankly it was impossible not to break down ourselves once they left - I haven't cried in public since I was a child, and I'm not ashamed to say that I just couldn't hold it together. I can't imagine going through what that family is going through right now.
Right now our country is dealing with a lot of change in our health care system thanks in large part to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. There's (rightfully) a lot of discussion about how our health care system and the related health insurance industry work. The debate often focuses on cost and on whether or not we're moving towards a system of "socialized" medicine similar to Canada's or the UK's, and if we are, whether that will lead to a stall in medical advances that have led to every day "miracles" like what our family experienced.
Those are all worthy discussion points, but after yesterday all I could think was this: when it's your child in the operating room you really don't care how expensive the procedure is, you just want him to have whatever it takes to make him well. I would gladly live in a cardboard box in order not to have to hear what that poor mother next to us heard. Whatever we do I hope we continue to work towards making sure that fewer and fewer parents have to hear that their child doesn't have a miracle available to them at any price.
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