GatewayRedbirds.com

I'd like to post this as a bit of a cautionary tale to all here on GRB. It's likely that atleast half of us here will have cancer, heart disease, or something horribly wrong and life threatening in our lives. So here are two quick cautionary tales and as encouragement to always seek a second opinion.

First as most of you know my gf was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer over a year ago. The day the doctor told us she had it he also basically said to start planning the funeral. It was a matter of weeks or maybe a few months and she would be dead. Fortunately we got a second opinion from a guy who specializes in this. Well here we are over a year later with the doctor saying at the last visit "I've looked, I didn't see an expiration date on you."

Flash forward to today. At 5:30am my Dad is pounding on my front door and yelling for me. My Grandfather had been rushed to the hospital just an hour earlier and the doctor there said to call the family in, he wouldn't make it through the day. Well my family decided to take him to a cardiologist just to be sure. Well we haul ass to the cardiologist he looks things over, runs a few tests, and says "he needs a pacemaker, I want to do it right now." A few hours later the procedure was done my Grandfather was up and joking around and look better then he's looked in some time.

The bottom line is get a second opinion, hell get a third opinion, just because some dick is an MD doesn't mean he knows what he's doing. It reminds me of something a doctor friend said to me last year when he said "remember the guys that finish at the bottom of their class still get to practice medicine. "

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Tonight this fool's halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell, And I feel like I'm comin' home

http://www.infinite-garage.com

Doctors are highly trained, but they aren't infallible. Multiple opinions are a no-brainer.

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Silence is golden.

It's very good advice. I've dealt enough with doctors the past year to know this: They don't know [expletive]. It's more art than science, and you better get a couple of heads together to make an informed decision. The more the merrier. I'll bet we had 6+ surgeons consulting on my son Ryan recently.

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"Boy, that was exciting. I always say it ain't over til it's over, but that one should've been over a while ago." ~ Yogi Berra

I'm just going to step in for the doctors of the world for a second and say, hey [expletive] off. You think they're trying to be wrong, or being lazy? Even the worst doctor in a class is called doctor because if they weren't good enough, they wouldn't have made it through years of extra school plus residency. They wouldn't match anywhere and you wouldn't have to see them. No, they aren't infallible, but they're incredibly skilled and and they know infinitely more about healthcare than you do. You can get a second, third, tenth opinion, but it doesn't mean the first one is always wrong.

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Obamneycare is working.

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Catch my drift? Or am I being obtuse?

I never said wrong or lazy. I am way to frustrated with the entire state of the medical community - from the doctors to the nurses to the adminstrative staff - to really write my thoughts down here. Let's just say I'm less than enamored.

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"Boy, that was exciting. I always say it ain't over til it's over, but that one should've been over a while ago." ~ Yogi Berra

It took me 2 years to convince doctors that my shoulder was [expletive] up despite having a physical therapist tell me such at the very beginning. It took a year to get them to decide maybe we should do an MRI... which rarely shows what's actually going on in the joint, and then after the second MRI a little tear was seen, so they finally decided to do orthoscopic surgery in which they found a number of other issues once they went inside. Thanks for making me spend my high school career primarily as a DH.

Yea, I know medicine is complex, but perhaps if some of them would be a little less arrogant and stop thinking their patients are full of [expletive] maybe they could get things right more often.

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I feel the same way. The shear amount of [expletive] that we have had to go through to get my gf what she actually needed to still be alive is amazing. It's all ego in the medical industry from the nurses to the doctors, [expletive] even the lab people. Giant egos all along the way. When we wanted a second opinion my gf's original doctor said he would drop her as a patient because he was insulted. So in his lobby in front of a 100 people I called him a [expletive] son of a [expletive] and repeated what he said to me so his patients could hear. I hope some of them quit, but since you basically can't pick your doctors in this supposed God damned free country I know they didn't quit because they can't.

I hate the whole system from insurance to the doctors. It all needs blown up and started over with about half the employees, none of the insurance death panels, and many of the doctors with a swift kick to the nuts.

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Tonight this fool's halfway to heaven and just a mile outta hell, And I feel like I'm comin' home

http://www.infinite-garage.com

It sounds medical.

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The human body is incredibly complex, obviously. With the ER doctor. They obviously knew there was a heart problem, the cardiologist was able to fix it. Without the ER doc's diagnosis, would you have been able to go see a cardiologist on a seconds notice?

There's like a trillion things that can be wrong at any given time. Just because you go online and correctly diagnose your own symptom and your doctor gets it wrong one time doesn't mean you are smarter or your doctor is stupid or any combination of those things.

I know of multiple people that are very intelligent, imo, that have been denied med school or failed out. In other words, those that graduate are pretty damn smart just to be able to get through it.

I hate the system as much as anyone, but doctors probably get a little too bad of a rap sometimes. And, of course, in some circumstances it is deserved.

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