My Doctor Cousin's Gloom

When I was in Albuquerque, I gave my doctor cousin a telephone call. She was in a glum, depressed mood about her work. She reports a wave of death in her hospital, making a mockery of her efforts. She's taken to haunting the death statistics office at the hospital, trying to assess just how bad the situation is. 

The deaths result from either: 

• people showing up at the hospital with undiagnosed stage four cancers, and thus already beyond help, or; 
• people suffering weird infections that even amputation can't solve, and that require massive doses of antibiotics just to survive.  

My doctor cousin speculates that people are not getting the health care they need in a timely way, and we discussed that possibility.

My doctor cousin also worries about the growing use of nurse-practitioners instead of doctors.  Doctors can be sued; nurse-practitioners can't be sued, and so there is great interest in the hospitals for using nurse-practitioners whenever possible.  Nurse-practitioners miss diagnoses though.  They don't have the proper training.  My doctor cousin recently berated a nurse-practitioner for missing a cancer diagnosis, which resulted in an unnecessary early death.

My doctor cousin's report contradicts another report that New Mexico has the lowest average annual new cancer rate in the country.  A Facebook friend speculates that maybe untreated New Mexico people are dying of cancer too fast to get reported in new-cancer statistics. The rapid deaths clean up the pool of ill people before it gets sampled for cancer incidence.  Maybe that's it.

And I learned another friend of mine has been battling a dangerous infection for a long time, which worsened last September, and has improved only lately, after massive doses of antibiotics.  I'm worried about her future.