We Don’t Think This Could Happen
This may open with a request for you to view an ad, but you can skip that: It’s amazing that this could happen with our healthcare system in place, but it has.
It’s striking that a 24 year old father died because of lack of ability to afford getting a tooth pulled. After 2 weeks, infection caused swelling and pain that he couldn’t tolerate; I can only imagine. This led him to go to the Emergency Department for treatment, that consisted of prescriptions for pain relief and antibiotics.
Since he couldn’t afford both prescriptions, he opted for the pain killers. The infection spread quickly to his brain (just think of what a short route that is, especially along nerve tracts) and he died.
Where did it fall short? Being without health insurance was the first hurdle, and he couldn’t afford the most rudimentary (for our standards) of health care. He did what he could to take care of it, but we don’t know how the critical nature of taking care of the infection as well as the pain was stressed (or that the pain was coming from the infection in the tooth and surrounding areas.)
A Dr. Jim Jirjis, director of general internal medicine at Vanderbilt University, was interviewed and he said “He (Willis, the man who died) might as well have been living in 1927”.
In these economic times, I’m not saying that things don’t happen, but this seems like it could have been more easily preventable. But it also points out that healthcare is a commodity that has levels of being available.
