Resistance, Eat My Dust!

The RV Trip to Hell

By: Susan Schiller

Pulling into traffic, we hitched our little home on wheels over the mountains and through Utah. Although our half-ton truck was having engine troubles we had a surgery appointment to catch in California, so we kept trucking, hoping we could make it. We pulled into an RV park in Bakersfield and prepared for what we were told would be a few months of treatments, tests, and follow up. Insurance was to pay for all the expenses.

We were naive enough to believe it.

Finally the big day arrived and we headed to a hospital we had never been to before. Considering we exhausted the medical resources in Bakersfield and this was his 10th surgery, you could say we were quite familiar with medical establishments and protocol.

I fully anticipated "same old, same old" but everything about this hospital reeked of 'foreign' … and it wasn't solely because nearly every employee spoke with a foreign accent.

The first red flag was at admittance. My husband's pen was flying fast as he scribbled his signature on what appeared to be a novel-length stack of paperwork. Picking up one of the pages my scam-sniffer registered "Warning, warning!" as I read that the hospital expected their patients to promise never to sue them if one of their staff members accidentally harmed them!

"Let's just get this over with," was my husband's response to my hesitation, so I let the page drop onto the thick stack. Next, we were taken into a prep area. It seemed to be either a season where a lot of new staff were being trained, or perhaps it was a training hospital – we didn't know. But when a young nurse dropped a needle on the floor and then quickly grabbed it and continued to insert it into the patient's arm next to Randy, we were stunned.

The surgical team quit speaking English and it was as if we were in a foreign country. This was totally different than all the past surgeries.

A staff member arrived with Randy's 'cocktail' of drugs to put him to sleep before his final surgery. Just before dozing off, Randy remembers his gurney falling to the floor and the nurse having to get duct tape to repair a broken piece. The last image he saw before waking up was blood splattered on the walls.

I settled in for a long wait. We knew it was going to be a tough surgery. The trick would be to remove all the wires and electronics without tearing the spinal cord. They would have to leave a good portion of the stimulator inside because it was too dangerous to remove the whole machine. By the end of the day, with no word coming out of surgery, I decided to ask how my husband was doing. I discovered he had been sent up to a private room. That didn't make sense, because it was supposed to be out-patient surgery.

Arriving at my husband's room, I found two nurses having a very personal conversation about their private lives. At least they were speaking English! Then a curious thing happened after they left. A woman arrived to announce it was time for my husband's surgery! Randy was a bit groggy but he was able to tell her that he had already had his surgery. She argued, pointing to her clipboard, that it was time for him to go to surgery. I intervened and assured her that my husband was all done with his surgery. I showed her the staples.

Needing to find someone in charge of releasing my husband, I summoned the floor nurse. She was a very large black woman with a gorgeous smile and a contagious giggle. She was the same nurse who had been gossiping when I first entered the room. "Oh, you don't need to bother with this man leaving the hospital today … I'm going to take him home with me!"

It was a surreal moment… I looked at Randy, and even in his groggy and pain-filled eyes I could definitely understand what he was silently saying, "Get me out of here!" A second nurse arrived and knelt low to take my husband's pulse. The first nurse began purring about her special patient and the second nurse smiled and began petting Randy's hand. When a third nurse arrived with a walker, Randy became fully awake and indignant and demanded to be released. He was NOT going to walk up and down the hall with a walker and he was not going to sit and listen to nurses talking about taking him home with them – he was going to go home!

It took a few phone calls, but I finally got hold of the surgeon's assistant, who authorized Randy's release. We were never so glad to leave a hospital – it was certainly a very different experience than any place else we had ever been. We made the trip from Los Angeles to Bakersfield in record time, since it was well past rush hour. It felt so good to be 'home'!

The next day I received an email stating that the insurance company was declining paying for services. I asked about the follow up appointment and received the same negative answer. Ten days later it was time to remove the staples, so again I asked if we could have an appointment, but was denied. So I went to a couple pharmacies to purchase a staple remover, and no luck… it turned out you need a prescription to get a staple remover… so I tried getting a doctor's appointment, and no luck. Finally, I found a place on the internet that would sell me a staple remover and FedEx it the next day!

So I removed Randy's staples on my own. But by then fever had set in – not in a normal post-operative way. Like an unwelcome guest it stayed and stayed and stayed. By then we could no longer afford to remain in California, so I scoured the internet for a close enough RV park with affordable rates. After a 5-hour drive we landed in the John Wayne RV Park just over the border, in Arizona.

We soon discovered that the RV park, located outside of town on the edge of the desert, was the historic rendezvous point for illegals crossing the border. It appeared whole families made the trek across the desert, from the discarded clothing we discovered… including diapers, shoes, and even an old mattress.

A kind neighbor thoughtfully warned me that many women get raped in that area, so it might be a good idea to stay in the RV and not venture out.

Randy couldn't sit or lay down without tremendous pain, so he walked out in the desert for hours at a time. Within a few days he was slowing down and after a couple weeks he could barely stand up. Insurance was still balking about any more medical appointments, so we felt it was time to hitch up and return to Montana, where at least we knew our country doctor could help!

On my way back from the RV park office, an RV park resident approached me saying, "You know, after your husband dies? Well, you can come and live with me in my RV." He reeked of alcohol and I ran as fast as I could back to the RV.

Insurance finally did agree for Randy to receive follow up treatment, but by then massive scar tissue had already built up. The first doctor, in follow up, exclaimed, "Who's in charge of this butcher job??" The second doctor, a homeopath several states away from the first doctor, told us, "Whoever did this surgery forgot the inside stitching!"

In times like these you have to be careful what you focus on, because what you focus on you get more of!

Even when life gets totally ridiculously insane, there is still Truth and Beauty everywhere we look.

Sometimes it's just a little harder to ignore the Resistance. So every night we were careful to enjoy the astonishing Arizona sunsets and then to bask under the black, starry sky. Our neighbors in the RV park seemed to be quite a bit worse off than we were, so we gave them rides to the local WalMart and to the hospital when they were sick. No matter how mad or bad life gets, we can always choose to switch our focus and to get our eyes off of ourselves.

We can focus on what is Beautiful, Trustworthy, True, and of Good Report!

We create our world. We can change the atmosphere, no matter how bad it gets. Sometimes we learn this lesson the hard way, like Randy and I did.

How about you? Have you been "to hell and back"? What lessons did you learn?