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My Emergency Surgery In Montevideo, Uruguay
By Rodger Bailey
30 years ago I had emergency surgery to remove my gall bladder. This happened in 1980, which was my last year working at IBM. Many things happened in these last 30 years and one of them was a growth of a fat pocket on my belly near the scar from that surgery. When I weighed around 300 pounds, this fat pocket was not noticeable, but in the last few years, I got my weight down to about 240 pounds and this fat pocket showed up as a protuberance on my belly. This year, I have gotten my weight down to 225 and it had become even more noticeable. One Sunday morning it became much larger. I started having nausea and a generalized pain in my belly. In the next hour, the pain had intensified to and focused on the fat pocket, it became very hard, and it stuck out much more than ever before. We called our medical emergency service and at 10:30am a doctor came and examined me and said this was possibly a critical problem requiring surgery. I was carried by ambulance to our hospital emergency room by noon and was more thoroughly examined with blood tests and x-rays. By 3pm the trauma doctor, the staff surgeon, and on-call cardiologist had all examined me and agreed that this was a surgical problem and that I was okay for that surgery. At 4pm, I was visited and examined by the on-call surgeon, who scheduled surgery for me on Monday morning at 9am. So, I was admitted to the hospital that afternoon by 5pm and Isabel and I spent the night there (our level of service gives us private room with a sofa-bed for the person accompanying me). The next day, I was up at 7:45am and I showered and got into the surgical gown. Here in Uruguay at this hospital this is a flannel poncho with a couple of ties on each side. It would have offered a little more privacy than the open backed gown used in the states, except that the normal height of Uruguayans is 5'8", and because I'm 6'4" it was not very private. But, every one was very respectful and kept a sheet over me (from my chest to my feet) while I was moving to and from the surgery room and operating table. The surgery was fast and uneventfully. They went in through the old scar line, so they did not have to shave anything. They found a 3cm hole in my abdominal muscle wall that had opened from the original surgery, through which had been slowly migrating some belly fat into that pocket for years. The immediate cause of the problem the day before was that some of the fat had become twisted (they called it strangled) and this caused the pain and the fat becoming hard. The surgical solution was to open the original scar, untwist this escaped fat, shove it back into my belly, close up the hole, and then close the entry incision. It took them less than an hour. They had administered my anesthetic perfectly so that I woke up as I entered the recovery room (they told me that I helped myself move from the operating table to the gurney, but I don't remember that part). I was on my way to my room in 45 minutes and I was back in my bed there by 11am. I was up and walking in the afternoon and I started writing this before I went to sleep for the night (WI-FI and TV were included in our room). What makes this story amazing for me is that I'm in Uruguay, a 3rd world country. The medical system is based in an HMO kind of system (here it is called a mutualista) where we pay monthly and are expected to use our service to stay healthy with regular medical checkups. My wife and I pay about $300/month for this service (which covers both of us) and we are paying the highest rate for the highest level of service. We also pay about $6/co-pay for visits to the doctor's office and about $6/co-pay for a month's worth of each medicine prescribed for us. We also have a parallel ambulance and emergency service which sends a doctor or an ambulance with doctor to our home when we request it. This service costs us about $80/month. This emergency situation including the doctor to our home, a different doctor in the ambulance carrying us to the hospital emergency room, 4 different doctors in the emergency room, the anesthesiologist, surgery with a great surgical team (the surgeons were a father-daughter team), three nights in a private room with a sofa-bed for my wife, and an ambulance to carry us home was all included in our monthly fee for no extra cost. An added feature is that in this particular HMO the staff were all very friendly and competent. It was a pleasure to have any of the staff interact with us. Their rapport skills were excellent and this included even the cleaning staff (of course, the surgeon did not necessarily have very good rapport skills and I don't need or even want that from a surgeon, but that is another story). The only draw-back for this experience is that I have to wear a post-surgical abdominal girdle for the next few months and I am required to refrain from any lifting during this time. Other than the discomfort of the medical aspects of this situation, I feel very lucky that we were prepared for this kind of thing and I feel fortunate about the choices we had made in using these organizations for our health services.
Rodger Bailey, MS and his wife, Isabel, have been working with children with developmental problems for many years. Their protocols are successful in re-engaging the developmental process for children who have been stuck developmentally and getting them back on track.
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UCM Emergency Medical and Ambulance Service
| The HMO we use is SMI-Impasa
PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE
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Hey Rodger! Glad to see you're alright. -- And welcome back. We missed ya!
It seems to me, from the many conversatioons I have had around the world, that there is only one 'civilised' country in the world that does not provide adequate health care for its population - the good old U S of A! It staggers me that a country that can tie up hundreds of billions of dollars in destructive weapons of mass destruction can blithely deny the provision of a few billion dollars worth of life saving social services. Your experience was not 'amazing because you are in Uruguay' but a reflection of the sanity exhibited by other countries where the national health is concerned and an indictment of the penny pinching disregard of the nation's health by the USA administration.
Good thing you made it through OK. Thank you for sharing the experience, the intel was visually rich and kept me glued to my screen. I'd say the situation in Uruguay seems to be exactly the same as that of most third-world countries (and the US), the haves get good medical care and the haves not don't get any. Though I have to admit, having a well-organized HMO is pretty amazing, mostly people in third-world countries tend to pay cash for whatever they need, whether a blood test or a kidney transplant.
 | | nick May 20, 2010 05:13 | |
So glad you're o.k. and that everything went well for you.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us!
It's good to have you back, Rodger. Sorry to hear about your need for an operation, but glad that all is well.
Thank you for sharing this interesting experience.
Good external links!
Best to you.
Frederick
The copyright for this content entitled "My Emergency Surgery In Montevideo, Uruguay" has been specified by the contributor as:
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