Elbow-leading health advocates

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 22 June 2008 01:45PM CST

Section: ESRD

AssertivenessDoc Searls is struggling through health problems and blogging about the experience.

A couple of days ago Searls linked to Francine Hardaway advising patients not to go to the hospital alone. Always take an advocate—preferably one that leads with their elbows—with you. Good advice. Read it.

When my kidneys failed I was blessed to have a good friend—a nurse practitioner who actually wrote the early dialysis protocols—as an advocate. She was with my wife and me for the hospitalization, every medical appointment, and even found a better dialysis center than the one to which I was originally assigned.

My funniest recollection is when she’d start asking my first nephrologist questions like, “Aren’t you going to check….” His response was invariably, “Oh, right, I was just going to do that.”

To this day, I’m not sure I would have survived without her questions like that.

So here’s to all the elbow-leading health advocates and all the questions they bring. Happy solstice.

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