Cancer, when guessing just won't do.

Imagine you're in work, you get a phone call telling you your house is on fire. You phone the fire brigade and they go a douse the fire. They call you back and tell you they have saved your home, that everything you owned was safe. Then you get home that day and find your home has been burned to the ground. Your home is destroyed. Everything gone. You ring the fire brigade and ask them what the hell? They shrug and say 'well we thought it was out, it looked out'.
Wouldn't you be angry? Wouldn't you have questions?
But in the back of your mind you know possessions can be replaced. You're angry and upset, but it's not like your family was in the fire. Was it?
I've written before about the shocking state of our health system. We're supposed to be a wealthy country, we've had ten years of unbelievable wealth and progress, but our health care system is crumbling about our ears and it appears nothing and no one knows how to shore it up.
It was with growing disbelief that I listened to Karl Henry talk on Newstalk this morning about how Ann Moriarty, his beloved wife and mother to his child, was twice misdiagnosed and subsequently died from a particularly aggressive form of cancer that had spread through her body. Ann was twice given the all clear and had two x-rays misread in two separate hospitals. The poor woman was sick and dying and indeed died in April, a number of months after she had been sent home from hospital with a prescription for an upset stomach.
It beggars belief that in this day and age such unprofessional and frankly disgraceful practices are allowed to exist. Having lost loved ones to cancer, it upsets me to think how that woman must have suffered. It upsets me to think how her son and husband must be feeling, how let down and devastated they must be. To be given another chance and a hope that your family might pull through a terrible illness like cancer only to have that hope ripped to shreds by incompetent medical professionals. To put your faith in the hands of others only to see them blunder about with what is most precious to you.
I don't know Karl Henry remained so measured today. It's probably a lot more than I would have managed. He and his family have my deepest sympathies.
But this effects us all. This kind of stupid, incompetent, blasé mishandling of people at their most vulnerable, when LITERALLY it is a matter of life and death, must surely shake all of us to the core. That could have been me, that could have been you, that could have been your son, your daughter, your husband, your mother.
It's not fucking good enough.

I'll let you read it here


Too depressing for words.