https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...-kept-rock-legend-dick-dale-touring-till-end/ This legend never smoked, drank or did drugs, ending up spending his millions just to keep himself alive. This is a ****ing sad story.
My wife uses a foley catheter draining into a collection bag.
The operation making it possible is called a "super-pubic vesicostomy" which is a medical way of saying that the surgeons made a stoma above ("super-pubic") the pubic area to insert the foley tube directly into her bladder.
And because the VA doctor was especially kind...when she rolled her eyes at the prospect, he asked why.
"Great, so now I will have TWO belly buttons. You know, being a woman and all."
DOCTOR: "Well, there's no reason I can't just go ahead and use your belly button, we can put the stoma there if you like, and then you will still only have one belly button, it's just that you'll be peeing out of it from now on. You could win money in a bar bet that way, you know."
So...my wife pees out of her belly button, and has for twenty some years.
Originally, Medicare was paying for the foley catheters, and they said that they expected each foley to last up to a month.
This led to a lot of urinary tract infections, some of them quite serious.
A few times she got so septic that she almost died.
The VA finally decided to take over the cost, and now she gets about twenty or thirty every three months, more than enough.
I don't know off the top of my head how many collection bags we get every three months but we've never run out yet.
If we get close to running out of foleys, I can just call or let the docs know when we go in for her appointments and they'll just give us a bunch to take home, no questions asked, or else they just put extras in the mail.
Dick Dale's diabetes was a large factor in why the bag infections were happening, diabetics are more prone to those types of infections, your skin tissues are more sensitive, your immune system is weaker and you don't heal as fast, and Dick also ultimately wound up having to ration his insulin sometimes thanks to the recently jacked up prices. Because of his touring lifestyle, he needed a fast acting type of insulin which is as much as $500 a month. His renal failure issues were also due to his diabetes.
How do I know all this? I used to
"know" Dick Dale back when I worked for his friend Hal Jepsen, a surf film legend.
People talk about how bad VA health care is but all I can say is, if Dick Dale had been able to use VA health care, he probably wouldn't have suffered quite so much.
PS: At the rate Medicare is being slashed by the current administration, it will be toast in another six or seven years.
:3oops:
