Radiation anyone?

In treatment for thyroid cancer, patients are often given a dose of radioactive iodine which will dissolve any thyroid cancer cells. But as you swallow radiation, it is then released from your body in its normal processes - sweat, saliva, urine - over the next few days. Now a days, patients are released from the hospital the same day and told to stay away from pregnant women and small children, sleep alone, and not share food or drink for a few days. Apparently before 1997 the NRC mandated hospital stays during radiation decay.

I don't remember this part. I don't recall being hospitalized for radiation. I think I was given radioactive iodine and sent home. My brain is a sieve but you would think I would remember that.

But the problem now a days, is patients who don't live near their hospital/place of treatment are then spending the night in a hotel while emitting radiation. Who knows who is going to stay in that bed next and get exposed to radiation? Who is going to clean the room and get exposed to radiation? (Between bed bug scares - which make my skin crawl - and things like potential radiation exposure that make me want to avoid hotels for ever.)

I don't think of radiation as being this really scary thing. I worked for a scientific instrumentation company which had many machines that use radiation as well as manufacturing systems for measuring different kinds of radiation. Any radioactive element has a half life which is how long it takes to decay. Some have a half life of 3 days and some of 3 million years. So somethings that were radioactive are no longer. I believe (in my non scientific brain and through reading posts like this read all the way down to the last one)that RAI is radioactive for a few weeks but you can expel it from your body sooner through its natural processes.

But it is a conundrum - if you get a treatment involving radiation, when can/should you be released into the general public? Are insurance companies again making unsafe decisions?

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Insuring sick people?

The beginnings of the new health care reform program are starting and apparently insurance companies are having to change the way they do business and start insuring sick people. Hmmm... Isn't the whole reason to have health insurance is in case you get sick?

I think a shake up of the insurance industry is a good idea. I mean there are people out there who faithfully pay their premiums and then get a nasty medical diagnosis and their insurance companies drop them.

Which makes me think a minute. Aren't insurance companies not supposed to know what your health issues are? It is fairly obvious. If first you submit a bill for a mammogram, and then an ultrasound, and then a biopsy, and then a consultation with an oncologist. I am sure they figured out that one. So obviously in this case, insurance companies are in the wrong for looking at what is going on with your health and then dropping you.

I am not getting on the political horse here to talk about the right and wrong of health care reform because this isn't about politics. I just want to write about the patient side of things.

I am lucky in that I have good health insurance and live in a state with many protective laws. But this really kills me when insurance companies say: "...insurers say the new rules could require them to cover too many sick children and too few healthy ones." Now the new laws are requiring them to change the way they do business - which I see as a good thing. What if you could only get health insurance if you were healthy? This has been a reality in some places.

Let's just hope that now sick people can get insurance.

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