Eggo Waffles and Healthcare Innovation
This is the route I was on the night I fell while rock climbing.
Eggo waffles and healthcare innovation. No, I did not get too much sun on my hike on Saturday. The story I’m about to share with you was my first real attempt to innovate as a newly developing chronic patient. Often, patient centered innovation is defined as building a better clinical trial, a targeted medicine, or a revolutionary surgery technique just to name a few. Although needed and greatly appreciated, they are innovation bent to form into healthcare’s perspective. We tend to forget that for patients like me, healthcare isn’t just when I’m taking a med, in a hospital, or giving myself a Enbrel shot. Healthcare is a 24/7 adventure, even when I’m trying to make an Eggo waffle. It’s story time.
In June 2003, I fell about 15 feet while rock climbing. The short version is I didn’t put in a quickdraw correctly so when I fell it didn’t catch me. In my case, gravity exploited my error to its advantage which caused me to hit the ground and roll down the hill a couple of times before Chandra was able to grab the rope and stop me. I was in trouble, bad trouble. It’s hard to describe the sensation I felt once I stopped but it was very similar to what I imagine R2D2 felt after he was shot in the Return of the Jedi and all his gadgets popped out. Both my physical and mental health had absolutely no idea what was happening, so it tried to throw every possible pain control and mental state combination possible in order to regain some sense of control. All my gadgets had popped out which meant at one point I think I tried to design a cure for cancer while simultaneously being afraid of snakes while wondering if any girls wanted to date me. If absolute zero is a state, then I was absolute confused.
At that time, I did not have any health insurance which meant I did not want to call for an ambulance. That day I had drove to the climbing spot which was about a 15-minute walk to my car. Being stubborn and cash light meant that I gave Chandra (Chandra was a fellow ski instructor and friend) my car keys and she drove to the ER of the nearest hospital. To put me back together, I required 10 screws and a plate in my left arm, 6 staples in my head, and a 3 day stay at St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center before I was stable enough to be released back to my 500 square foot basement apartment in the trendy north end of Boise. This would become my official welcoming to the world of chronic, I just didn’t know that at the time.
During this period of my life, I enjoyed a couple of Eggo waffles with the famous Log Cabin syrup for breakfast. Actually, what I would have preferred was a sausage omelet with a side of bacon and a huge mug of OJ but I was too lazy to make that every day. Let’s be honest, eating Eggo’s was like having warm doughnuts for breakfast with liquid sugar on top…fake taste passing as fake nutrition. Anyways, the morning after coming home from St. Luke’s I wanted my usual Eggo but had a huge problem. I kept my toaster in the bottom cupboard on the right in my kitchen but physically I did not have the strength or ability to bend down enough to pick up the toaster from the cupboard and put it on my counter so I could toast my Eggo.
It is now 20 years later, and I can still remember stopping in the middle of my kitchen to stare at my toaster because I thought it had won, that I wasn’t going to be able to have my Eggo. Worst still, I was wondering whether I would need to wait for either mom or dad to come check on me before I could eat breakfast. Being a 20 something at the time meant I would be embarrassed if I had to ask my parents to make me breakfast again. Then suddenly, I had an idea, it was almost like an old cartoon when an animated lightbulb appears above the character indicating they had just had a brilliant idea.
In my kitchen there was a long rug on the floor. The cupboard was only a couple of inches above the floor, so I was able to hook the toaster with my right foot and gently push it out from the shelf and onto the rug. I then went to the head of the rug and pulled it with my right foot to my living room next to the chair at my computer desk. Once I had the toaster close enough to my computer chair, I sat down in it and with my long Gumby like arms was able to pull the toaster up from the rug and sat it on my computer desk. I then stood up and put the toaster into the chair and rolled my computer chair into the kitchen. Once near the counter, I was able to lift the toaster out of my computer chair and onto my kitchen counter. Victory was mine and that Eggo with Log Cabin syrup tasted good.
As silly and odd as this might sound, this Eggo incident in my life ranks as one of my proudest accomplishments. Considering the amount of pain and bruising (the bruising from my fall was so bad that the resident working that night in the ER thought I had ruptured my spleen. He was so convinced that I was in a CT scan for my spleen before I had one on my neck and left arm) I had developed after the fall there would have been no shame in asking a parent or friend to pull the toaster out from the bottom cupboard. In fact, I’m guessing 20 risk analysis specialists would have agreed that I should wait for someone due to the extent of my injuries. Maybe it was all the drugs still running through my system, maybe it is just who I am as a person, but problem solving that moment seemed critical for me to undertake as part of my patient journey. I needed to accept that for the rest of my life, routine tasks like getting a toaster out were no longer routine. Problem solving for me now meant both how might I scale Mount Everest and how might I eat breakfast today.
Unfortunately, medical innovation doesn’t consider my ability to eat Eggo’s for breakfast as counting as healthcare. In the case of my fall, healthcare meant should my surgeon use a soft cast, hard cast, or a combination of both (Dr. Lamey choose a combination of both if you are curious) for the new 10 screws and plate in my left arm. Healthcare meant how might I take the multiple pain pills my doctor prescribed in a timeline that would best control my pain and prevent losing control of said pain. In my case, innovation meant how might I ice my wound without burring the skin around the incision which was still healing form the trauma. Innovation also meant working with my physical therapist on wearing his newly invented braces to improve the range of motion in my wrist. Healthcare only happened during certain times during my day even though I now had to practice healthcare during my entire day.
Maybe it’s due to our country’s level of technology or maybe its just laziness, but we (the collective we) now have reduced routine tasks like retrieving a toaster, brushing one’s teeth, putting on shoes, wearing pants to a yes or no proposition. If the answer is no, we assume it must be an acute type of problem and go to a doctor or some other provider expecting an easy and thanks to an unrealistic expectation of our current technology, a fast treatment option. However, this does not account for chronic patients like me. There are no easy or fast tech options because this is now a lifelong problem for me requiring the ability to problem solve on an ever-evolving journey. My patient journey and life are now the same thing, being a patient is no longer a scheduled appointment on the calendar of my life.
Chronic patients must get comfortable with being uncomfortable or else we will miss out on life. Boundaries are mistaken for safety, when in fact they are opportunities for a higher quality of life if a patient chooses. I’ll even go as far as to state that this is the secret to our (patients) life. Technology can help, put there needs to be a greater understanding of our patient journeys. We are asking for and needing items to make a life just a little bit easier, we understand a cure is unlikely. I believe the technical term is a better understanding of “upstream obstacles”, as the patient I call it life or my patient journey, they are both the same thing in my book.
My left wrist the night I fell rock climbing.