Advances in Medicine...

I have done a fair amount of complaining or at least sharing my frustration with the medical system, the lack of resources, and the side effects of meds.  In my effort to be more grateful, I stopped to assess the current advances in medicine.  I was talking to Kyle today about the experience of my dad's first heart attack when I was 8 years old.  This would have been about 1990 or so.  He was hospitalized for almost a week and then a month and a half later went out of state to get an angioplasty.  It was a huge deal at the time.  Since then, he's had triple bypass surgery and several stints put in.  Aside from the bypass, each of his heart related visits to hospitals has been shorter in duration, and even the bypass meant less time in the hospital in 1999 than it did for chest pain in 1990.  

I visited the surgeon who will do my breast reduction today, and the surgical facility next door where the surgery will happen.  It's an outpatient surgery, which seems crazy to me.  If they are able to manage my pain, and I am able to hold down fluids and food, I get to go home (or possibly, to my hotel room) by mid-afternoon after surgery at 8 am.  So despite anesthesia and considerable incisions, I'll be out of there in less than six to seven hours.  Granted, I can't wait to get settled in back at home, but it's a little scary to be given that freedom so early.  Especially after the complications I had last time.  Preemptive measures are being take to prevent those, though, so it's good to know I won't have to be in a noisy hospital.  Though I will have to sleep sitting up for about 10 days, this is pretty insignificant given all I know about what to expect.  

Patients get to go home so much sooner these days. And that's terrific!  It's also amazing in many ways.  They can cut you open and send you home the same day.  They can stick a teensy little "tube" into your arteries in your heart via your groin and send you home within a day or so.  So as much as I complain about the crummy parts of medication and doctors, there are also many advances in medicine that make life far better, longer and more enjoyable.  (Not to mention medications that do the same!)

It's my goal to remember that there is much to be grateful for, and what are annoyances to me would be greatly appreciated by someone with fewer options in lesser developed places.