Sunday, October 2, 2011

Some Medical Stress and a Realization!

Katie the Poo has an ear infection that has had us quite worried (we did not know it was her ears). More details are in her blog, http://katie-poo.blogspot.com but this scare has brought some fears to the surface for us.

Being “out here” and not in our usual place with the usual familiar resources, like doctors, Vets, hospitals, etc. available to us, has been an unspoken “what-if” concern from the beginning of our planning.  We just did not really think much about how it would make us feel because we had worked through plans for how to deal with any such situations that might arise.  Trust me! It made us feel pretty helpless and exposed!

Simple things, like finding a Veterinarian for our little girl was not as simple as we had planned.  Mer had to call 4 vets offices before we found one that could even see her.  Fortunately, St Augustine has a Regional Emergency Veterinary Hospital just for nights and weekends and once we were referred to them, it became much easier to make headway.

But time goes so slow when you are in pain.  When one you love is in pain, it seems to be stationary! Worse than that is not knowing exactly where help will come from or how to get there.  When we got settled into this campground we kept an eye open for nearby vets “just in case” we should need one for Katie.  It turned out that when we did actually  NEED one, none of these were available and that was scary.  Suppose it had been one of us rather than Katie?  How hard would it have been to have been seen by a doctor in a strange town?

This whole area needs more work for the future. In the past 24 hours, I have gone through all sorts of scenarios involving one of both of us needing immediate medical care and in light of yesterday’s events, I can no longer just assume that going to a nearby hospital or ER or Urgent care is going to work. I think we really need to figure out a way to get the care we might need in a strange place on a moment’s notice.

One thing that we became aware of is the natural tendency to deny the possible severity of a problem because of the apparent logistical difficulty in getting appropriate help right away. I mean that it’s easier to say “it is not THAT bad” than to say “take me to the hospital” when one does not know exactly where that hospital is, how to get care there, how to pay for it and how to endure all the assumed delays and indifference that will surely be a part of making that choice. It feels better to hope it will get better than to fear it will get worse so action must be taken, now!

There will be more to come on this topic. This is a really big hole in being prepared no matter where we might be.  But, being out on the road with nothing familiar around makes this lack of adequate preparation potentially lethal.

ttfn

Budd

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