Yikes, it was a clean sweep! She lost her ability to paint too.
Posted on 11/10/2009 7:27:49 PM PST by wafflehouse
A Widow Paints A Health Care Protest by Joseph Shapiro
On a humid day this summer, in a parking lot at the long back wall of a gas station, Regina Holliday stood on a scaffold with her palette of red, black and blue and started painting a mural. At the center, there's a dying man in a hospital. It's Regina Holliday's husband, Fred. He died on June 17th of kidney cancer. He was 39 years old, with his wife and two young sons. For official Washington, this has been the season of health care overhaul. Fred and Regina's personal health care struggle overlapped the policy debate going on in another part of the city.
Now she's painted the story of her husband's difficult final days on the gas station wall in a residential neighborhood several miles from the U.S. Capitol and the White House.
Regina thinks if her husband had had better access to his medical records, he would have gotten better care. It's the story she tells in the mural. "So here he is, his eyes closed," she says, describing the image of her husband, seeming to spill out of his hospital bed. It's a painterly reference to another political work of art, Jacques-Louis David's 1793 painting The Death of Marat.
Like Marat in that famous painting, Regina has painted her husband holding a note. "He's got a paper in his hand. It says: 'Go After Them Regina, Love Fred.' Because that's what he told me to do." Fred met Regina — she's small with red hair — in art class back in Oklahoma. They'd paint and argue — about art, movies, politics and life. In Washington, Fred taught film classes at a university.
Things changed quickly when Fred got sick earlier this year. "So starting in January, like on Inauguration Day, Fred was already in pain," explains Regina. "So we went to the doctor, we went to the ER, because he had massive chest pain. And it turned out he had a broken rib. We don't know why he had a broken rib. Maybe it was from coughing. Everybody was coughing back in January. OK, broken rib from coughing." Only it wasn't just a broken rib. Fred had kidney cancer. And it had spread to the bones of his rib cage.
The mural tells the story of a horrible day back in the spring. Fred was being transferred to a new hospital and Regina needed records of Fred's many tests and treatments from the old hospital. "I had gone down to medical records," Holliday says, "and they said, 'That'll be 73 cents a page and a 21-day wait.' I said, 'My husband is upstairs with Stage IV kidney cancer in your hospital and you're telling me I have to wait 21 days? Everything's on the computer. All you got to do is print it out and you're going to make me wait 21 days?' And they're like, 'Yeah, that's just the way it is.' I was floored." A spokeswoman for that hospital says, for privacy reasons, it can't speak about a specific patient, but that it routinely sends records with a patient who's being transferred to a new hospital.
But Regina Holliday said that didn't happen, and when Fred arrived at the new hospital, nurses there scrambled to find someone at the old hospital who could provide the records. And that as a result, Fred went several hours without treatment or his pain medications. (A spokesperson for the new hospital says it's not unusual for a patient to be transferred without up-to-date records.) Regina recalls that day, trying to choke back tears, but her voice rising in hurt and anger: "He was in so much pain, he was crying, he was like, 'I hurt so bad.' And they couldn't even feed him. I had to go down to the local pizzeria, and I had to, I had to get him pizza because without the correct transfer information they couldn't feed him."
Over the next two months, Regina would see her husband go in and out of hospitals. But there was nothing doctors could do to save his life. Six days after Fred died, Regina picked up her paint brushes and started the mural.
The brick wall of the gas station faces a parking lot tucked off of a busy avenue. Important players in the health care debate drive by every day. "It's a wonderful therapy and relief to get to paint," said Holliday. "To get to do this has been a wonderful dialog with the public. I mean, people often come over here. They look at the mural. They want to talk about it and they often share their health stories."
She'd climb down from her scaffold to hear other people speak with anger and sadness about their own run-ins with doctors, hospitals and insurance companies. As summer turned to fall, and the battle over health care heated up, Regina's mural got more political. She added details, like a doctor, holding a sign that says Health Reform Now. And Regina got invited to a health care event at the White House, hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama.
The other day, with the last paint dry, there was a nighttime dedication of the mural. A few dozen friends and lots of kids gathered in the parking lot. They held flashlights to shine on the painting. People sang. And Regina answered questions about all the symbolism in her mural.
The clock with no hands: Because normal time seems suspended in a health emergency. The nurse at a computer with the dark screen: Because records aren't shared with patients. The doctor with her hands tied: Because one part of the health care system doesn't communicate with others.
Regina Holliday is looking for new walls to paint, but not now. The cold makes the paint too brittle. In the springtime, she'll take out her colors again. Maybe by then, there will be health care change signed into law. But there will still be stories to tell. This time she will paint the stories of others — of the people who've watched her work and told her about their own struggles as caregivers and patients.
I think she feels he’d have been cured if his care was state sponsored.
It’s likely his English teacher taught him about debate, but his journalism profs helped him unlearn it.
Maybe she could check how similar cases turn out in Britain or Canada.
And if that isn't stupid enough logic, she wants the federal government to take over health care because she expects them to put a stop to bureaucratic holdups.
Sorry that she lost both her husband and her brain. Sincerely, on both counts.
Oh, and what debate? This isn’t in a point-counter-point format. It is a feelbad story of hospital snafus. (Are these veterans facilities by any chance? Some of those are abysmal.)
A couple of hours — where did this detail get documented?
OKAY...And, Uncle Obomba will make it all better! More GOVERNMENT IS GOING TO MAKE IT WORSE, LADY!
Yikes, it was a clean sweep! She lost her ability to paint too.
From the article:
when Fred arrived at the new hospital, nurses there scrambled to find someone at the old hospital who could provide the records. And that as a result, Fred went several hours without treatment or his pain medications.
It is true, that “cure” will be worse than the illness. Many GOP legislators have suggested things that truly would be helpful, but they have been totally ignored in the Rat rush to the unholy grail. The snafu seems to have started with a missed diagnosis of the cancer itself. Normally a blood test will catch that. She thinks things are bad now, wait till half our doctors jump ship.
OK, but there should have been no excuse for not transferring a morphine prescription.
Absolutely. As I said, it was a typical bureaucratic snafu, exactly the thing the government creates better than anybody else. Even in this case of private hospitals, the regulations the government created likely caused the problem in the first place.
Now she wants the government to take over the system to fix the problems they created. Dingbat.
To the lady’s credit, she does not seem to be calling for a government run health plan. I don’t see any of that in her protest, no matter how quirky its form.
This administration does not seem interested in the least in hearing any opinions that differ even slightly from their own, so I'll maintain my assumption until I read otherwise.
Oh, God, if she thinks his care was substandard, disorganized, and indifferent, what does she think it would be like if it were staffed with the guys from the DMV? And the stuff that's wrong with healthcare today isn't because it's run like a business, it's because of interference from the government and insurance companies, one of the few industries whose business model is like...a government.
She looks like somebody they would like to woo (and NPR is in that boat) but surprising is the utter silence about the matter in the actual report. Shouldn’t there be a figure of an Uncle Sam somewhere in her picture?
Well, that and the fact that her doctor is holding a sign saying "Health Reform Now". To most people, "reform" means the government gets more power (stolen from us). I'm actually in favor of "Health Reform Now", but actual reform would be to get the government and insurance companies the hell out of my business.
Do you know how hard you have to cough to break a rib?
Stage IV kidney cancer is bad, a death sentance. I don’t think waiting 18 - 24 hours at the gubment emergency room will help that condition at all.
Once it was in the bone (he had a broken rib that was the first symptom of that problem, you recall), it was basically over. The worst this idiot woman can truly claim is that he suffered a few hours of pain because he didn't have his medical records. The only puzzling part is why he wasn't given pain medication. You don't have to have medical records to do that.
You, and all the other posters above are correct, of course. Had this happened under 0bamacare, the painting would be reflecting her pain over the fact that it was six months before he was even seen for treatment for the original complaint of chest pain.
It is unfortunate that they didn’t coordinate his transfer to the new hospital. Of course, as you note, nothing in the Obamacare legislation would help that — except the likelyhood that a person obviously dying would probably be refused a transfer to a new hospital under Obamacare, so they wouldn’t have the problem with records.
Oh, and the records might be available on the internet, since the Government would have absolute access to every bit of your records (including financial) and the government is notorious for losing private records into the public domain.
The logical argument goes like this:
1) Medical record transfer failed for this patient.
2) Therefore, our health care system is screwed up.
3) Therefore, we need government to do something to fix it.
4) Obamacare is government doing something.
5) Therefore, Obamacare will fix it.
6) Therefore, if Obamacare had been the law, her husband would not have died.
It’s not GOOD logic, or even LOGICAL logic. But it’s the argument Obama has been making, and the media has been accepting without question.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the 21-day wait and 73-cent charge were both put in place so they could meet the requirements of some law.
Under Obamacare, she wouldn’t have gotten much treatment for him, since he was terminal, so probably it would have gone more smoothly.
And I bet the morphine would have kept coming in sufficient dosage to put an end to his misery. Death panels aren’t just for old people.
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