While I look over this whole healthcare business and ponder whether I want to write some kind of thing about things, I came across this guy. He's one of those sickening intelligent people who come from sickeningly intelligent families who consistently write sickeningly smart, insightful things about their areas of expertise, in his case being public health (reminds me of the Huxleys and the Darwins, actually). Seriously, if you want a decent grip on a lot of healthcare issues, just read his New Yorker stuff. Obama reportedly ordered The Cost Conundrum to become required reading in The White House; his excellent piece of how heathcare reform was passed in various places in the world is engrossing with all sorts of historical tidbits; and as for horror, one either has the abstract (his piece on on how extended solitary confinement could be constituted as cruel and inhuman punishment, or even outright torture) or the visceral, to wit on itching. No kidding. Some seriously fucked up horror movie shit in there:
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.Now try going to sleep.
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“The guy next to you?” I asked. He had had shingles on his neck, she explained, and also developed a persistent itch. “Every night, they would wrap up his hands and wrap up mine.” She spoke more softly now. “But I heard he ended up dying from it, because he scratched into his carotid artery.”
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