Take two aspirin and don't call me, call the mortician

Knock on wood, I myself have been rather fortunate to live this long and never really need to spend much time with doctors or in a hospital for my own problems. I have spent a fair bit of time visiting or accompanying friends and loved ones there. The ER has to be the biggest misnomer I've ever heard of. In so many cases there is no emergency, just someone who feels bad and wants to be seen without an appointment. Here's the deal, if youre young and not pregnant most times if you feel like crap, its either because you didnt take care of yourself properly or you've got an ailment that many of the people around you have. Stop clogging up the system with your sniffles and sneezes and cases of the runs. I am sure people die every day because someone was bending a doc's ear about some rash they got after pulling weeds the weekend before, or spent some time with a coyote woman on Friday night. If you feel like crap call a doctor and make an appointment or use a walk-in clinic. All this sort of thing leads me to the title of this post.
Someone very dear to me passed along just over two years ago. She had been struggling with a form of cancer for a number of years and we all knew that it was only a matter of time. Unfortunately her time came earlier than perhaps it should have in a country with the level of care we should have available to those who really need it. Her end was punctuated by the hurricanes of 2004. She was hospitalized with pneumonia while she was evacuating from Hurricane Charley, because the system is overburdened she was rushed out well before she was ready to a nursing facility. They never treated her for the pneumonia, only the primary illness which she'd been dealing with for quite some time. Miscommunications in her transfer had her unmedicated for the pneumonia further and had her in physical therapy while she still had symptoms of pneumonia. We were told she would be coming home on the following Monday. She was rehospitalized on Friday and I received the call Saturday evening that she wouldn't make it through the night. She didn't, but she was surrounded by her loved ones at the end and for that I am grateful.
I am not shovelling out blame, because we are all human, and we will all pass on one day from one thing or another, but, the system failed her miserably. Everything was geared toward shuffling her off as quickly as possible to make room for someone else. Most of the staff I encounted on my visits were clearly overwhelmed and overworked. Someone, probably tired, or irritable, or simply had too many things going at once, didn't write something down, or tell someone the right things and so her care suffered for it, and it probably cut her life short. I'm sure the insurance company saved a bundle. Just think a moment the next time you rush off to the hospital for a runny nose, just think of what it might cost someone else.