Tag Archives: hospital

Waking up in Someone Else’s Body

What would you do if you woke up from a coma in someone else’s body, speaking a foreign language? Rory Curtis, a twenty-five-year-old British man, was in a coma for six days following a horrific car accident on a busy motorway in England. He suffered extensive brain damage; his blood vessels had burst and blood was leaking into his brain. For six days, doctors battled around the clock to save his life. When he woke up, he was speaking fluent …

Whose Advice Do You Take?

Long before the Internet became a staple in households, people went to their parents, doctors, clergymen, hairdressers, and bartenders for different kinds of advice. Nowadays, we can also add the Internet and YouTube as some of our advisors. But, does the Internet really qualify as an advisor? With all the information that’s out there, I would have thought so but, from conversations with a lot of people, I’m inclined to think that this mammoth information highway is at the bottom …

A Medical Lawsuit Waiting to Happen

According to several news sources, a UK 58-year-old grandmother of three, went to a community hospital to get help after she began to feel sick. She had had a heart attack six months before and she knew that she was having another heart attack, so she asked the receptionists to call an ambulance for her. As unbelievable as this sounds, they refused her and told her to call her own ambulance because she didn’t meet the urgency criteria of a …

A Good Liar

Are you a good liar? Can you recognize when a person is lying, and how reliable are the polygraphs, the tests to determine if someone is lying? Someone who is not a practiced liar will probably show signs of nervousness or breaking out in a cold sweat when lying about something that is crucial. Their eyes could be dead giveaways or their body language could give many clues. However, when it comes to a practiced liar or a pathological liar …

The Living Will

When the concept of a Living Will first came out, my attorney didn’t want to draw one up for me. He told me that, unlike a Last Will and Testament, a Living Will is not a legal document. In those days, it was not called a Living Will; it was called Death With Dignity. That was many decades ago and he drew one up for me, anyway, because I was so insistent on it. The first Death With Dignity document I …

“. . . In Sickness and in Health . . .”

Those words have been a crucial part of every marriage ceremony I’ve ever attended. Yet, what do they really mean? Maybe it’s because I’m so much older now and I’m surrounded by people my age who are no longer in good health. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been exposed to more people aging, getting sick, and dying, that I hear so much about people running out on their marriages when their spouse is diagnosed with a terminal illness. I suppose …

Raising Your Parents

One of the hardest things to witness is seeing your parents, once vivacious, decisive, and socially active, incapable of making even the simplest decisions for themselves. The aging process can be very hard on parents and children, in different, but equal measure. It can be the crippling symptoms of disease or just the disorientation associated with old age, but somewhere along the line you may find yourself in a role reversal, parenting your parents. All of a sudden, your advisors …

Home Alone

I try not to judge someone else’s parenting style because we each have different styles and no one knows for sure if one is better than another. However, and this is a big however . . . when I read about this couple’s parenting style, there was no way I could stifle my response. Many times we are called upon to see both sides of an argument and the old saying is true that there are three sides to a …

Playing Detective

When most people think of a private detective, they think of someone sitting in a car on a stakeout or someone using binoculars, or someone taking pictures with a telephoto lens to use as incriminating evidence. They think of getting the goods on an unfaithful spouse or lover and catching them in flagrante delicto. They think of someone breaking into offices or hospitals to unearth private information, talking to people who have known the person being investigated, trailing that person …

Connie H. Deutsch