Ulog # 013| Access Denied
Access Denied
Dear people of Steemit,
I apologize for not using my own pictures. I could not take any because of the dangers around the area.
Yesterday morning I commented to a fellow steemian (@josediccus), who is suffering in a Nigerian hospital due to
a precarious medical attention, that in Venezuela we know what it feels like
. It did not take too long to be slapped in the face by reality and, worse yet, in a clinic built with our university’s money, money from our salaries and which overnight went from being a model clinic in the region to becoming one of the bad places to be if you are sick.Attention at the Centro Clínico Universitario (formerly known as CCUDO because it was own and run by the Universidad de Oriente, or so we thought) used to be fast (you just provided your ID number), little paperwork, total friendliness, cleanliness and comfort; all you could need in one place, a dream come true. We used to have an insurance policy that guaranteed us total coverage of any of the services provided by the clinic. It did not last long. Mysteriously, it changed owners, and in a few years the revolution made sure to bankrupt our university health care system (insufficient funds, obstructionism, interventions) and substituted it for an aberration they called SISMEU.
This new government-run centralized administration of the health system has hung from the neck of every university worker (that’s what we are called now) a death sentence.
In order for you to have an idea, the maximun coverage of our revolutionary policy (to the date) is of about VEF 10 million, the clinic charges you 6 million, just for admission. With the doctor’s consultation the coverage is over; everything after that is on the patients and their desperate relatives.
All this preambule to tell
yesterday’s anecdote
. In the afternoon, my wife, who had been enduring for days a mysterious pain, a mix of lumbago and renal colic, (precisely, avoiding to have to go to an ER and face the penury of medical attention, the via crucis at the pharmacies trying to find the prescriptions, or the money-borrowing to afford them, in case we find them) asked me to please take her to the clinic. She felt that bad.After a long wait to get a taxi and pay 200k Bs for the service, we arrived at an almost deserted clinic with a receptionist that looked like she did not belong in there (scruffy, no uniform). When we requested admission and declared what insurance we had, the young girl started to rummage through papers and monitors, as if she had lost SISMEU itself. After making some calls she demanded the usual docs: policy holder’s Work ID and national ID card, patient’s ID.
Then she asked for my wife’s birth certificate
. We thought she was joking. She wasn’t. Worse yet, then she asked for our marriage certificate (I’m not making this up).
Noticing my wife’s reaction and knowing her recent volatility (a byproduct of so much shit raining on us)
I hurried to talk to the young girl, who seemed to be improvising with the procedure, as decently as I could
. I tried to explain to her that no adult carries a birth certificate in their own country, least of all to show them at clinics; that the Identification Card, or the working ID would in any case be the only logical documentation to have at hand because all other documents have already been provided to employer and insurance company in tedious census and identity verifications of policy holder and dependents; hat the university ID card already has in the back the already verified data of dependents.It was useless. In light of my wife’s emergency and the intransigency of the young employee all hell broke loose
. The receptionist refused to process our demand for medical attention because we had been too aggressive; that only angered my wife some more, which brought a middle-aged man who I assumed was part of security, even though he did not look like one (no uniform or ID), but neither did the receptionist, so what the hell! I persuaded him to let her be; we had all our right to at least vent our anger in light of such an absurdly inhumane treatment. Our clinic is definitely gone. In its place we have an empty building to which our access is de facto denied.
We demanded to see a supervisor; we were ignored
. We went up looking for some administration employee; the office was closed. A caretaker informed us that administration does not work on weekends
. We had no choice but leaving. We were blinded by indignation and the hospital was not an option (overcrowding, insalubrity, lack of supplies etc.). The worst thing was that on our way out we could not catch a taxi to go back home. We had to walk a distance long enough to exhaust an average pedestrian, let alone someone in pain. I felt my wife’s pain had migrated from her ribs to her heart. I felt totally powerless.
The clinic itself may not be directly responsable of this disgrace. They may not be guilty of having less qualified personnel or resources available to take care of patients, but the administration could have made a better job at least informing the public by different means about the absurd requirements of the insurance companies, assuming they are the ones at fault (there wasn’t even a piece of paper indicating the new documents that must be produced to get medical attention).
There is not a single institution where we can denounce this kind of abuse. Everything is under the control of the chavista State.
The overwhelming frustration we’re feeling cannot be put into words; it is something you have to live. It is visceral and can only be experienced sometimes in a dangerously intimate manner. A frustrated desire to revert by all means necessary this shithole we have fallen into is burning us from inside.
We have been sentenced to death via different mechanisms; it’s just a matter of time and of how good our body defenses are.
In the meantime, my wife is taking pain killers, without a diagnosis and silently enduring her pain
. Tomorrow, we’ll try to get medical attention paying out of pocket; some lab test and a doctor’s visit that would give us some peace of mind. With our limited budgets, there is not much to do.If the government is aiming at capturing all conspirators wanting to assassinate the president, they will have to fill every stadium in the country; they are millions, and it would be in self-defense. The government shot first, and they are aiming to the head; left us without reasonable options.
Thanks for stopping by. I really value your comments, so feel free to leave one.
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Unbelievable! That's horrible. I hope your wife gets better soon.
Thanks. We are at another clinic, same story, only this time i brought the docs. Waiting for lab tests and a big bill. There are tons of mosquitoes, by the way, in the clinic. So, we'll probably be trading pains for malaria.
Mosquitoes are everywhere. Be careful.
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