Horrible day. I had a tooth pulled out. I have a condition called thrombocytopenia, which is similar to hemophilia, but it involves very low blood platelets. I need to regularly monitor my platelet levels to ensure they don’t drop below a certain threshold. The tooth extraction was supposed to make me bleed for 5 minutes, but I ended up bleeding for 3 hours. After that, I started feeling very weak, in addition to the pain from the extraction itself.
Two days later, I woke up in the middle of the night, at 4 a.m., with terrible convulsions. I thought I was going to faint for sure. I had no fever, and it wasn’t cold. I felt tremors throughout my entire body, along with palpitations and chest fatigue. After 15 minutes, I took a fever/pain reducer and walked around the house a bit. Strangely, I felt less uncomfortable standing than lying down. Shortly after taking the pill (about 10 minutes), the tremors stopped. Miraculously, it wasn’t going to be the day I died after all.
The next day, I went to see the pediatrician who has been following me since birth at the hospital to check if I hadn’t lost too many platelets. The pediatrician, who had always encouraged me to regularly monitor my platelets, refused to give me this prescription and advised me to go to the emergency room to check if I was anemic. I went to the emergency room. Without examining me, the nurse declared that I couldn’t be treated because I was standing up.
I then asked him if he was familiar with thrombocytopenia and if he knew that there is a risk of a ‘hemorrhagic accident’ below 25,000 platelets. He answered yes. He added that I could be seen by the on-call doctor, but there was no on-call doctor that day (and he knew it). Of course, I have neither his identity nor any proof of this failure to assist. All of this was just words lost in the wind, and he knew that too.
I told the emergency nurse that I wasn’t physically capable of fighting to negotiate an admission to the emergency room, and I left the hospital. On the way back, I reported the situation to the director of the pediatric department at the hospital, who knows me for conducting research on my condition and taking blood samples from me, but the person was absent today, and I could only leave a message on their voicemail.
I then called my general practitioner, who never answers the phone, not even for scheduling appointments—this is done online. However, my dumbphone didn’t have internet access! By some miracle, he answered and directed me to a laboratory he knew, capable of providing my test results within 6 hours, without having to wait until Monday morning (it was a Friday). I had to get to the lab before noon, and fortunately, we caught a tram and arrived just in time, my half-brother David and I.
The hospital could have obtained the results in 15 minutes, but this was an acceptable compromise since I could go to sleep tonight knowing whether I was at risk of a hemorrhagic incident or not (and receive a transfusion if necessary to prevent it). Since COVID, I regularly go to the hospital emergency room, and I always face the same blatant willingness to ‘let people die’ who show up with severe symptoms. As long as there’s no visible blood, we’re just seen as hypochondriacs in their eyes. They act like real judges, deciding who can die with their mouth open and who deserves to be saved ■
