When Diabetes Strikes
My-seh: There are two women I know somewhere in the United States [unless they are fictional] who had a similar predicament.
One woman had a few children and was then diagnosed with diabetes ל"ע. The doctors warned her that having more children would be hazardous to her health and endanger her life. In addition, she had very very little money to live on, adding to the stress of raising her very difficult children.
The other woman had two girls at which point the doctor told her that she has diabetes and that having more children would be hazardous to her health and endanger her life. Money wasn't a problem in her home but health now was.
The first woman elected to continue having children. She is up to about number 10 [with possibly more to come]. No money, challenging children [very......] and diabetes. She moves forward.
The second woman took her doctor's advice, stopped having children and came to terms with the fact that she would have just two. Then she found out [after it was too late] that her doctor goofed. She didn't have diabetes after all. Goofy doctor!!!
Li-myseh:
Doctors Are Fallible - Get A Second Opinion
1] In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published the famous "To Err Is Human" report, which dropped a bombshell on the medical community by reporting that up to 98,000 people a year die because of mistakes in hospitals. The number was initially disputed, but is now widely accepted by doctors and hospital officials — and quoted ubiquitously in the media.
In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year.
Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death.
That would make medical errors the third-leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease, which is the first, and cancer, which is second.
Dr. David Mayer, vice president of quality and safety at Maryland-based MedStar Health, said people can make arguments about how many patient deaths are hastened by poor hospital care, but that's not really the point. All the estimates, even on the low end, expose a crisis, he said.
"Way too many people are being harmed by unintentional medical error," Mayer said, "and it needs to be corrected."
DON'T BELIEVE IN DOCTORS. BELIEVE IN G-D. HE IS INFALLIBLE. They make mistakes all the time. That doesn't mean you shouldn't go to doctors. Just that you should be a bit wary. Ideally, of course, one should never get sick. Then you avoid the whole problem.
Our Surroundings Influence Us
2] Who was right? Woman number 1 or woman number 2? I am not here to judge but I will say this. Woman number one comes from a community where a woman's main task is seen as being to have many children. Woman number two comes from a community where the families are smaller and a woman usually has broad involvement in the outside world [i.e. a career, hobbies etc.].
I don't think that it would be going out on a limb to say that the communities that these respective women came from influenced their decisions. So the lesson is - we don't live in a vacuum. Our surroundings influence our decisions - even those that involve life or death.
NO EXCUSES
3] I am not here to say that woman one is correct in her decision to keep having children, above and beyond what she can physically manage. Most healthy, robust women wouldn't manage in her situation. She also lived on the 4th floor with no elevator, which meant constant schlepping of children and packages up and down many stairs. But I will say this - she had every excuse to make life easier for herself and to stop having children. Yet, it was so important to her she trudged on.
When something isn't important to us, we often make excuses. When something is important enough, we do it, despite any extenuating circumstances.
A few days ago a chashuv Baal Tzdaka from LA was niftar, named Mr. Sol Teichman [I didn't know him personally but I know his brother]. When he was a young man, he was on a death march to Dachau. His brother, who was a foot taller than he was, said that he had no more energy and thus risked being shot dead by the Nazis for not marching on in line. Mr. Teichman CARRIED HIS BROTHER ON HIS BACK. For how long? He said that he doesn't know how he did it but they told him that the march was SEVENTY MILES.
This is something to think about next time we make excuses.....
