“On the Street Where You Live”
MRSA can affect anyone. It does not discriminate. It affects newborns and preemies, young people, middle aged and elderly, men and women, black, white, yellow, brown. It doesn’t matter. It effects anyone. I recently read an article about how MRSA killed the retired CEO of a Hartford CT hospital, in his own hospital! Then I found this excerpt from a non fiction book written by Julia Nora Pilas. I cried when I read these two chapters of her book. I can relate. So can all the other MRSA victims’ survivors.
All of us who have lost someone we loved because of MRSA experienced the same shock, frustration, anger, hope then devastation, over the unexpected and unnecessary infection. We watched as our loved ones trusted their hospitals to make them better. They entered their hospitals frightened but also knowing they would get the best of care and the best results of that care. The optimism we had is necessary for healing. We must hope for the best and we expect the best. Then when the doctor or nurse tells us that our loved on has an infection that may or may not respond to antibiotics it’s like getting hit over the head with a sledgehammer. Then on top of that, we learn that our loved one caught this infection while under the hospitals care. We become angry. It is human nature. When anybody is let down about something as important as our loved ones LIFE, it is enraging.
My anger fired my activism with MRSA. It still does. Something drives me when I write on this blog, or speak in front of cameras and reporters, or go to Maine Quality Forum meetings or write and call my Senators and Representatives, both State and Federal. I know they are listening now. We will make a difference for future patients. We have to.
Please look at this excert from Ms Pilas. I plan to buy the book, maybe you will too.
http://www.juliapilasauthor.com/excerpt.htm
Addendum
I read Ms Pilas’ book. I felt exactly the same fears, confusion, anger, distrust, and horror when my father went through his MRSA crisis. It is an unnecessary shame on our hospitals and doctors that this eidemic in modern healthcare facilities has not been controlled long before this. Ms Pilas’ mother and all of her sisters watched as her beloved father suffered with festering infection with drainage so profuse that it ran onto the floor. His kidneys shut down, he couldn’t breath on his own when the endotrachial tube was removed. And all he asked for was “help” and “to go home”. I listened to those same pleas from my father, for 3 months. My mother and I wanted to take him home from the nursing home but there was no round the clock help available for us to care for him at home. His MRSA rendered him helpless and weak. He never walked after his infection, nor could he turn in bed or get up to the toilet.
These are the real life horrors of hospital acquired MRSA infections. The suffering is horrible and it needs to be stopped. Anyone who reads this book will fully understand our anger, and the resulting determination to stop MRSA infections.
I find it most interesting that our media and our government officials have been on top of “swine flu” but still insist on keeping MRSA this countries “BEST KEPT SECRET”. Could it be because the swine flu is Mexico’s irresponsibility and MRSA is ours? 900,000 Americans a year contract MRSA and 300,000 die because of it. MRSA not only kills you it mutilates your body and sadly our hospitals have not only come to expect it they have also come to accept it. “This is the United States of America in the twenty first century not a third world country in the stoneage – how dare anyone think any human being dying horrifically be acceptable”. It’s about time we Americans band together and be heard… If we want to survive a hospital stay we have to make it our business to become as educated as we can on these infections. We have to insist on changes and most of all we have to let our hospitals know we will not be using their facility until they “clean up their act”! Please visit my web site and read my book http://www.juliapilasauthor.com and view my http://www.youtube.com (type in jnpilas in the search box)- It May Save Your Life!
I am all for Health Care Reform – however Health Care Reform shouldn’t have to cost us billions…instead if our hospitals were made to “clean up and dissinfect” it would save lives and our Health Care Providers billions in “Irresponsible Hospital Costs”.
Unless we get to the “root of our high Health Care Costs” all the Government changes and taxpayers dollars won’t make a bit of difference. As long as the problem of “Hospital Infections” exists….so will billions be wasted and lives be lost.