Mishandled: the medical idiots

In 2006 Husband F was ailing. Continually plagued by fibrillations, which would leave him weak and wobbly, even confused as the blood would not be properly getting to his brain, he developed a nasty flu/bronchitis in July, which eventually had us going to a local doctor at ten pm one night as he was not breathing easily. The doctor, a young man we had not seen before as he had taken over the practice of our own doctor, diagnosed bronchitis, and we came away armed with costly pills and potions for the condition but nothing much seemed to change; his breathing continued to worry him, right through the administration of more pills and yet more pills. Eventually - and I am not sure about the exact sequence of events - he was admitted to ICU in a private city hospital, the first of many such urgent visits - all, I must add, at huge expense.

We were told that he had a lung condition, incurable - caused by cordarone, a constituent of the heart drug F was on for fibrillations. It would, said the lung specialist in a roundabout way, eventually kill him.

We were also told that his breathing was not because of the young doctor's diagnosis of a stubborn post nasal drip, but was his lungs filling up with water because his heart was not beating properly.

"The man's an idiot!" said the heart specialist.

The incurable lung condition would turn his lungs slowly to "leather" and they would stop working. Nice. Caused by a drug administered a couple of years ago by heart specialists, the first of which was in London in a very famous heart hospital. And continued by a specialist back here at home in South Africa. The side effects known, of course, known - but not divulged. Who else, I think, is an idiot?

The first thing we were told upon diagnosis in the London hospital was that F had atrial fibrillations but that they would not kill him - (no, unspoken: it would be the drugs). What does a doctor THINK as he faces an anxious patient across his desk and prescribes something knowing that it is a death warrant to be discovered, surprise upon unfortunate surprise, later?)

And, as I also later found out, my dearest man would indeed be killed indirectly by the fibrillations, as his heart could not, in the end, cope.