ELLEN IN MEDICALAND:TRUE STORIES OF HOW I FELL DOWN MEDICINE'S BLACK HOLE AND STILL LIVED AFTER ALL tells the true story of what it's like to be a patient and a caregiver at a Harvard-teaching hospital in Boston. It is a veritable eye-opener and a window on our broken health system. If this book were fiction, you would say that these things could never happen, that they are too Twilight Zonish and off-the-wall. However, they actually happened to me and my mother.
Ellen In Medicaland is a medical memoir of sixteen chapters. You will be with me in Medical Care from Hell, where I was misdiagnosed with terminal cancer. You will read how the whole system botched my care: the doctors, the nurses and the administration, with never an apology from any of those involved. Instead, to them my traumatic experience was simply medical business as usual at this hospital and no one was accountable for the mistakes that were made. Fortunately, I lived to tell the tale.
You will be with me through four chapters of Looking for a Needle in a Haystack, where I search for a good, competent primary care physician and mostly coming up empty. You will read about my interactions with these medical people and how most of them ultimately failed me, a healthy woman who needed the most minimal of medical care.
Then you will read about my experiences as my mother's caregiver and her journey into Medicaland, which lasted for seven years when she had a chronic illness. You will see how the surgeons, neurologists and other medical people related to me and my mother - sometimes very kindly, other times without any basic decency. Medicaland was a foreign country for us and it seemed many times as if we would never learn its language.
Finally, you will learn that you can get good health care - I am not bashing the medical profession. However, you will see that you must be vigilant in Medicaland because it is very dangerous there for the uninformed.
With sparkling wit, humor and intelligence, I take you on a compelling medical journey, one you will be thinking about long after you put my book down.
