princessjade
In 2001 my youngest brother was diagnosed - stage I, with testicular cancer at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara. They performed surgery to remove the tumor (this is after he went in quite a few times complaining of pain and they disregarded it). They did this as an outpatient!! They removed one of his testicles and let him recover for 2 hours, then sent him on his way. The thing I hated most (he was 17 years old at the time) was that they wheeled him out in a wheelchair, and my mom had pulled up along the curb to pick him up and my dad was out there next to him, in the wheelchair. The nurse said that my brother HAD to get up out of the wheelchair and WALK to the car. My macho brother was in tears from the pain, and it took him about 15 minutes to walk the 3 feet. My mom was yelling to my dad "help him, help him" and my dad couldn't because the Kaiser nurse said he couldn't. Later I found out that the reason they required that was so that if anything went wrong, they can say "he walked out of the hospital himself" those damn bastards. I can't stand them.
Anyway, he went on to have another surgery, in his lymph nodes. They said they got all the cancer, and he could go in remission. Then, 4 months later they announced to him "we were wrong, you are in stage 4 now" and started chemo the following week. How do you get from stage 1 to stage 4 just like that? They were monitoring him every week. They gave him a mixture of chemo drugs, and he went into cardiac arrest. He survived, and is now in remission, but I think that has more to do with the health food stuff my mom and I forced him to take. (Wheat grass juice, seasilver liquid vitamins, etc).
I cannot stand Kaiser permanente. I hate HMOs. I actually am pretty *%#&¤?§*ed off at our whole healtchare system and allopathic medicine in general.
My two cents.
PJ