FEDS: Government saved my life

I thought it was the strawberries. Really.

About a month ago I bought some vanilla yogurt and a pound of "first of the season" strawberries to make Strawberry Greek Yogurt. It's easy and tasty and I at least used to recommend it. (OK, I still do.)

A week later, I got a really strange feeling in the belly. A quick Internet search revealed the symptoms of e.coli poisoning - which looked identical to what I had, and which has come from strawberries because of bad sanitation in the fields. Oh well... I can recover from pretty much anything, so I figured the next couple of days were gonna suck and I'd be OK after that.

The next couple days sucked worse than the first - which doesn't usually happen. Most people read The Press over breakfast and, on average, two people read each copy of a newspaper so in the interest of not killing 45,000-plus people's appetites I'll leave the good parts out. Off to Spokane.

During the Clinton Administration, the Veterans Administration's medical centers, which were previously reserved for combat veterans, were experiencing a rapid decline in business because the combat veterans were dying off. They decided to allow all honorably discharged veterans to enroll. I'm one of those, so I enrolled just in case. That's where I went.

The VA uses a different website than I did, so they CT-scanned me and came up with a better diagnosis: a burst appendix that encapsulated itself in mucus so it couldn't leak. Somewhere around five gallons of Ringer's Lactate With Potassium and a gallon of antibiotics later, and I'm good to go. They didn't remove the appendix the first time I was there; it's actually more dangerous to dig through the capsule when it's fresh and swollen than it is to leave the burst appendix in there until the capsule shrinks some. They'll remove it on April 18.

Stories like this normally give the time and place of the fundraiser to help the subjects pay their medical bills. There won't be one this time because it's not necessary, but if you insist send $20 to the Dirne Community Health Center. They can use it.

There are three points to this story.

Point 1: The Press has carried many letters claiming the government can't run a health care system as efficiently as the private sector, and single-payer systems are automatically bad. The VA is a government-run single-payer health care system, and it looks, to me at least, to be more efficient than the private-sector health system. They have to be; wounded warriors are very expensive to treat because they present conditions no civilian would ever have. One of their biggest economies: because the VA is a single-payer health care system, they don't have to treat the uninsured's head colds in the emergency room; they can send the routine cases to a clinic where care is far less expensive.

Point 2: If you are an honorably discharged veteran who is not enrolled in the VA system, you are a No Go at this station. The Coeur d'Alene VA Outpatient Clinic runs a daily bus to the Spokane VA, if you can't or don't want to drive there on your own. All you need is a copy of your DD Form 214. If you have private insurance, you can still use the VA if you're otherwise eligible; insurers are billed for the cost of care, and the VA takes care of the co-pays and deductibles. This is a win for us all; by accepting reimbursement from private insurers, the VA can provide more and better care for veterans.

Point 3, and the most important one: You are not me. Your burst appendix will not encapsulate. The CT scanner operator described the picture on his scope as "amazing," and the doctor told me no one on staff had ever seen an actual case of this present itself. If your appendix decides to burst, you are probably going to die. Come to think of it, people die of e.coli poisoning. So! If you get a weird food poison-y kinda cramping in your stomach, go to the doctor. Now.

JIM MOWREADER

Coeur d'Alene