We'll Always Have Mumbai

by Ray Richmond

So there I am late Saturday night with my 88-year-old mother in the emergency ward of Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. It is a place I have come to know all too intimately the past eight months as Mom's health has steadily deteriorated, as happens with someone whom has walked the Earth for nearly nine decades. Two of the people working here greet me by my first name, and I, theirs. We are comrades in (IV-poked) arms.

Mom is here because her body is continuing to wear out. She's determined to make it to 90, just because. But she knows the light is beginning to flicker out. She's sufficiently with-it to understand what's going on. She's resigned, and yet stoic. She won't be going without telling the Reaper to fuck off 7 or 8 times. And this night, she's back in the hospital for the sixth time since January because her left leg had stopped working. It had turned blue and cold and dead. A circulatory issue, they called it. I saw it as really shitty and unfair for a woman who had been a popper of vitamins and supplements her entire life.

As they're assessing what to do next at the hospital, they're doing the usual things you do: repeatedly and obsessively taking her blood pressure like an idiot savant performs complex mathematical formulas in his head; drawing blood with a vampire's relentlessness; and finally conducting an ultrasound procedure, the same kind one might to assess the gender and progress of a fetus in utero. The ultrasound evidently can determine if there's a blockage in the leg and where it's at, which is essential when there is a very real risk of gangrene and possible amputation if complications ensue.

I'm waiting with Mom in her room for the ultrasound results when it occurs to me that an inordinate amount of time has passed, even for this hurry-up-and-wait world. After two-and-a-half hours, I decide to ask a shockingly lucid and sociable nurse named Roger (as in "Roger that!") what the hold-up here might be, besides just the usual bureaucratic jerking-off.

"Well," Roger says, "it's tough, because we have to out-source the ultrasound results to India to get a read."

I assume this guy must be kidding. I mean, fuck me. That can't be true. Can it?

"No, I wish it weren't," Roger assures. "We need someone qualified to read these things, and at this time on a weekend night (it was about 1:30 a.m.) we don't have anyone here who can do it. So we're waiting right now to liaise with Mumbai for the results of your mother's vascular procedure."

No, really. Really?

"Really," Roger maintains.

And there you have it in the proverbial fucking nutshell. We were waiting in Burbank, California for some tritip-rejecting medi-dweeb in Mumbai, India -- who probably sits beside someone providing tech support for some pimply-faced schmuck trying to kill out a virus on his Dell desktop -- to look at my mother's blockage some 8,706 miles away and determine what kind of procedure she may require to save her life. Because evidently everyone in this particular hemisphere is at the opera or banging their girlfriend or just generally too fucking busy to give half a shit.

And anyone still questions whether our health care system might be broken? A better question might be whether there's even one left to save.

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