GLENN BECK, HOST (voice-over): ... And a personal voyage through the nightmare that is our health-care system. How a recent surgery taught me what really matters when you go under the knife.
BECK: ... Coming up, U.S. health care gone wrong. Yes, got firsthand experience in that department. I`ll tell you my story in tonight`s "Real Story."
BECK: Well, if you have access to the Internet, you`ve probably heard about my recent disappointing experience with our health-care system here in America. If you haven`t, buckle up. It`s going to be a bumpy ride. And trust me, your bottom will hurt at the end of it. It`s my health-care nightmare in tonight`s "Real Story."
BECK: Well, you may look at the recent surge of oil prices to over $100 a barrel and get, I don`t know, mildly concerned. But the reality is, it`s something that`s not only impacting our economy but the economy of the entire world. It is scary, and you need to know about it.
Coming up in just a bit, I`ll explain.
First, welcome to the "Real Story."
Now, since I`ve been out of work for a while recovering from surgery, naive little me thought, "Hey, Glenn, it would be a good idea if you post a video up on YouTube over the weekend and explain what happened." Well, there it is.
The next thing I know, the video is picked up by "The Drudge Report," made it on the front page of AOL.com, and now well over half a million people have seen it. My wife came in to me and said, "What were you thinking? It says on the bottle, `Don`t operate heavy machinery.`"
And I said good video. It`s not heavy.
So, if you didn`t listen to the radio show this morning, you still may be wondering exactly what kind of surgery I had. So here it is.
It was butt surgery. I had surgery on my ass. And that`s about it.
So go ahead, make all of the jokes. I mean, I`ll be here all night, so you can continue to make them.
The reason I went public with this whole debacle, despite the inevitable public embarrassment that I`m going to have to live with for the rest of my life -- and you can read all of the embarrassing details at glennbeck.com, if you really want to -- is, the reason I went forward with it is because what it taught me about health care in America.
I have seen our system at its very best, and unfortunately I`ve experienced it now at its very worst. You`ll hear some of that at the end of tonight`s broadcast, but in each case, the difference had nothing to do with having the latest equipment or a facility that looked like the Taj Mahal.
It had to do with people and compassion. It had to do with respect. It had to do with people treating people the way those people wanted to be treated themselves.
There were times over the last couple of weeks when I quite honestly was nothing more than a number. I really thought when I got out of the hospital I should get a driver`s license as well, because I felt like I was at a DMV.
There were times when people literally turned their back on my cries of pain and pleas for help. And I believe it was all because we have forgotten that the secret to health care, is contained right there in the word itself, "care."
Somewhere along the way we`ve lost that.
Don`t talk to me about universal health care or HMOs or how much you need a new MRI machine until you can look me in the eye and tell me that you have a staff full of people that have true compassion for their patients. Our politicians are right, we do have a health care crisis in this country, but it`s not going to get fixed by them. It`s not going to get fixed by a politician.
It`s not going to be fixed by the government or attorneys or by insurance companies. It`s certainly not going to be fixed by throwing more money around. After all, at the lowest of my lows, I didn`t care whether that hospital had marble in its bathrooms or plasma TVs up on the wall. The only thing I cared about was finding somebody who actually cared about me.
Regina Herzlinger is the author of "Who Killed Health Care?" and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
We seem to be, Regina, a society or a system now in health care that is just trying to shove the patients out that door as fast as they can. Is that anyway to run a system?
BECK: Well, what did you do on your Christmas vacation? As you may have heard, I spent five days in the hospital, and it inspired some of the darkest moments in my life. It is amazing to me how you can go from your highest to your lowest in just a short period of time.
After my surgery went wrong, I was in excruciating pain and the doctors went on working to prescribe a drug cocktail that I believe is usually reserved for Hollywood`s starlets on TMZ.com. I was on Morphine, Percocet, Toridol (ph), some synthetic Morphine derivative on a pump, and my favorite, Fentanyl. It is an end-of-life patch that is literally 80 times more powerful than Morphine.
The combination put me out of pain but in an incredibly dark place. I began hallucinating every time I would close my eyes. I would see horrific images of death.
Every time I would close my eyes, I would see the images of children with their faces being gnawed off by dogs. It was like entering my own movie theater constantly showing the movie "Saw."
I couldn`t escape it. It went on for two and a half days. And the combination of pain and hallucinations drove me to a point where I was literally suicidal.
I felt that there was no hope, that I would be better off dead. If I could have ended it at the hospital, at that moment, I would have if it wasn`t for one thing.
With all of that happening in my own head, you might think that I had an awful vacation, but you would only be partly right. While I would never want to live through that again, I learned something amazing.
The darkest shadows are only possible when the bright light is shining behind you. What I learned was something I guess I already knew. The brightest light in my life is my wife Tania.
At the hospital, where I was being treated more like an annoyance at times than a patient, I was basically carried by my tiny wife to a shower, and she climbed in fully clothed and cleaned me. She was my voice as she demanded that I receive proper care.
As I would drift in and out of my drug-induced mini coma, she was there. Every time I looked up, she was there holding my face in her hands.
1CNN
January 7, 2008 Monday
SHOW: GLENN BECK 7:00 PM EST
Obama, the Next President?; Which GOP Candidate Will Take New Hampshire?; Book Takes Tom Cruise to Task for Religion; Healthcare in America
BYLINE: Glenn Beck
GUESTS: Keith Boykin, Leslie Sanchez, Josh Green, Craig Shirley, Duncan Hunter, David Kuo, Regina Herzlinger, Marc Siegel, Peter Schiff
SECTION: NEWS; Domestic
LENGTH: 7555 words
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1 comment:
Poor little Glenn Beck, such a loser, he can not keep his lies straight. But then most of Fake News are in the same boat. Sweet.
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