Appendicitis surgery

It was early February a couple years ago and I had just finished
eating dinner with my host family in Kobe. I went to bed with a bit
of a stomachache, but nothing too serious. I woke up a few hours
later with severe stomach pains and, well, I spent a fair amount of
time that night hovering over the toilet bowl. I finally got to bed a
couple hours later and woke up feeling much better. Just a case of
food poisoning I thought.

I had a glass of water and in an instant, as if it was the catalyst
for a complete bodily meltdown, I was back repeating the same scenario
during the night before but feeling even worse. My Japanese host
mother drove me to the hospital down the street. When we arrived, the
nurses helped me on to a stretcher and I waited about twenty minutes
or so before they started taking my MRI and a few tests, I don't
remember too well. I remember there was a massive machine that
injected a giant syringe of warm fluid into my blood stream so they
could take pictures of my abdomen. A little bit after, the doctor
looked at the results and decided I had appendicitis.

Unfortunately, they couldn't do surgery on me because they were
already busy through to the next day. "So this is how it all ends" I
remember thinking for a few moments.

But the doctor came back to me a few minutes later and told me an
ambulance was waiting outside to take me to a nearby hospital that
could do the surgery right away. I arrived at the hospital, the
nurses brought me in, the anesthesiologist anesthetized me, and I woke
up in a bewildered state sometime later. The doctor came into my room
and said that it had burst so he had to disinfect the entire stomach.

Thus, instead of the normal quick twenty minute or so surgery that it
normally takes for an appendectomy, mine lasted about two hours. "It
was a little difficult," the doctor told me that night.

In Japan it seems they like to keep you around in the hospital for a
bit longer than the states, so I was kept for ten days, just to make
sure I was all well and ready to enter back into society. It wasn't a
wonderful experience, but the nurses were nice, and the doctor came in
to give me exceptional explanations of the procedure, with plastic
models of the body and everything. I ended up paying about $1,900
dollars.

Gavin
Japan
Hawaii

I have No medical horror stories

I've been living in Japan for 33 years
3 of my four children were born here (the eldest child was born in Denmark -- that cost me $26.00)
Last year I had a 3-hour surgery and stayed in the hospital for 3 weeks.
I/my family have never had difficulty paying any medical bills.
I have NO medical horror stories to tell.
Karen
Japan
California

Autoimmune Disorder and German health care system

My parents who are from California and Tennessee came to live in Germany in 1971 to pursue their academic careers. Thus, my older sister and I were born and raised in Germany, but have only U.S. citizenship. At the time of my parents’ immigration my mother was already very ill with juvenile diabetes, slowly losing her eyesight. During my childhood she had almost a dozen eye surgeries which were all paid for by the universal health care system of Germany and helped maintain her eyesight a little longer. Sadly, also other aspects of my mother’s health declined over the years and she became dependent on nursing staff to come to her apartment several times a day to check her blood sugar levels for her. Although we had fights with our health insurance over the amount of care they would pay for, we were glad that we lived in Germany and were able to afford the care that was needed. When my mother was diagnosed with end-stage ovarian cancer in May 2003, she was so ill that she died in hospital within three weeks after diagnosis. As hard as it was for us to deal with losing our mother and making funeral arrangements etc. we can be grateful that she received excellent care at the university hospital and that we did not have to pay any bills related to her hospital stay.

Not only our mother was highly dependent on the German universal healthcare system, at the age of 20 I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder and spent several weeks in the university hospital in the city where I was attending university. A myriad of diagnostic tests was performed, and no one ever said that certain tests could not be done due to high cost, and I never had to pay more than the normal amount of health insurance and prescription fees. Unfortunately, due to this pre-existing condition even in Germany I could no longer buy life-insurance. Already at that time I realized that I would probably never be able to afford life in the U.S. given my health issues. No one expected what happened less than five years later. At the age of 25, I suffered a stroke to the brainstem and cerebellum which left me in intensive care and then in a wheelchair for weeks. My health insurance paid for 8 days on the stroke unit, 5 weeks in a university hospital neurology unit, transfer to and 9 weeks in a highly specialized neurology rehabilitation facility, another 7 weeks in an outpatient rehabilitation facility in my hometown, and finally 2 more years of physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. They never put a limit as to how long they would pay for it as long as the doctors said that the therapy was required. I was highly motivated and practised a lot, otherwise my rehabilitation would have taken much longer I’m sure.

In the year after my stroke I required major abdominal surgery and have had health problems ever since. However, due to the great rehabilitation program I went through after my stroke and the high-quality diagnostics and therapy I am getting for my continued health problems, I have been able to go back to working full-time, although in a different line of work. I am able to continue (and afford) my hobbies of riding horses and travelling and consider myself to have a high quality of life. From what I hear from friends and relatives who live in the U.S., I am quite certain that I would not be able to maintain this life standard there regarding the cost of doctor’s visits, medications etc. that I need every year.

Natalie
Germany
Kern County, California