I have Kidney Stones occasionally.

I typically show 4 to 5 of the common drug seeking characteristics when entering a hospital. Seeking drugs? Damn right I am! Time - surprisingly it is usually around 10pm to midnight. I usually don't sit down in the waiting room, but pace slowly. While it is not intentional, I draw attention to myself. I am very quickly moved to the front of the queue as I elicit sympathy from the surrounding medical personnel. Demerol please. I have kidney stones. Sharp cutting pain here. I've had kidney stones before. The pain is familiar. Forget the CAT scan I'm not interested. What's it gong to tell me that I don't already know. (Ultrasound is ok.)

(Actually the hospital usually has my wife complete the admittance forms while they give me drugs.)


We are for Justice and Mercy, and Truth and Peace, and true Freedom. Edward Burroughs 1659

The articles state over and over that she'd been seen 3 times and discharged previously with pain medication.

And here's something else that's bothering me.  If she'd been seen three times complaining of the same problem, why wasn't someone looking for the underlying cause of her abdominal pain instead of just giving her pain meds?

Because that's exactly what happened to my sister's former student.  Three trips to the emergency room.  Three times sent home with "gas pains."  Fourth trip to the emergency room:  sent home with a diagnosis of stage 4 tissue and bone cancer, which had already metastisized.  It killed her in less than a year.  She was 12.

My sister says her student died of poverty.  Of not having her pain taken seriously because she was poor and black.

And it's not entirely the fault of the doctors who saw her -- as my sister points out, when you get your medical care entirely from the ER, there isn't going to be a lot of consistency and followup.  Getting acute treatment in an emergency room is no subsitute for having a doctor.

When I was barely an adult, 22 or so, I was living in a really poor, mainly black neighborhood.  There was a crack house next door, and first time I heard gunfire in the alley behind my house, I went and hid in the bathtub because I didn't want to get hit by a stray bullet.  (The idea seems a bit quaint to me now.  I can barely remember being that person.)

At first, I thought most of my neighbors were either really old, or really sick or something, because I kept seeing ambulances on my block.  No sirens, ever, they'd just pull up with lights flashing and sit there, and eventually the paramedics would emerge from some house or another with one of my neighbors on a stretcher, and they'd drive off eastward, toward the public hospital.

It took me a while to realize that the paramedics were essentially my neighborhood's primary care physicians.  When you're poor and don't have insurance, you don't go to the doctor until you're so sick that you need an ambulance, and then Medicaid pays for it.

Our medical system is criminal.  We should all be ashamed.  This woman who died on that emergency room floor -- her death is on all of our heads, because we have allowed this criminal healthcare system not just to continue, but to flourish.  Yes, our politicians and insurance companies have failed us, but that should be no suprise; they are, as always, more concerned with their own interests than with ours.  We have also failed ourselves, because we have not demanded that it change.  While the insurance companies and politicians and even the doctors have acted aggressively to protect and defend their interests, We The People have failed to protect our own.  And each other.

Health care ought not be a privilege.  And yet we, when we see things treated as privileges that ought to be rights (and it is not just health care) we fixate on obtaining those privileges rather than demanding that they be acknowledged as rights.

I forwarded the LA Times article to my family, who have and will react with the expected horror and anger, as I'm sure will many other comfortable middle-class families.  But, as terrible as this death is, as horrifying as Ms. Rodriguez's treatment (or lack of it) was, it is not unique, and as comments in this thread reflect, it is not even terribly surprising.  As long as people like me and my family and the millions of others like us sit there watching, horrified, like rubberneckers at a car accident, without demanding change, we are just as guilty of killing Ms. Rodriguez as any of those doctors and nurses in the ER.