Nobody showed up. Instead, a moment later, a voice came over the intercom, asking, "What do you need?" Of course, I couldn't talk, so I couldn't answer. After a minute, the voice said sternly, "If you don't say what you need, no one will come." I froze, and realized in a flash that I could die -- at the age of 15, in the hospital, with the surgical tools to save my life lying less than two feet away.
That was my first hint that the promise of health care to save lives can fall apart. Gaps like the one I experienced are not intentional on the part of doctors and nurses. Almost every health care professional I have ever talked with or heard about comes to work intending to do a good job. But things often go wrong. The health care system saves millions of lives every year, but it also has a lot of problems.
Interestingly, many of the biggest problems in health care are not due to a lack of technology or a lack of money. They are due to hidden assumptions on the part of doctors and nurses -- and on the part of patients and their families.
For example, in my situation, perhaps the person on the other end of the intercom assumed, "If a child presses the call button and then doesn't answer me when I speak to her, she must be fooling around."
