Melissa Mullamphy’s Story & Advice to Healthcare Self-Advocacy

00:00:00 – Melissa Mullamphy

00:00:02 – Dwight Heck
Good day and welcome to Give A Heckheck. On today’s show, I welcome Melissa Mullamphy. Melissa is a clinical psychologist, healthcare expert, advocate, and clinically acclaimed author. Has devoted her career to helping people navigate and understand America’s very complicated and imperfect healthcare system. After the unfortunate death of her mother from ovarian cancer and an eight month long nightmare, I will add, Melissa began a passionate journey to fight for patient advocacy. During my mother’s cancer diagnosis and treatment, I saw firsthand the failures of a broken medical system, a system full of good people working in a critically deficient framework, says Melissa. Her memoir, not in Vain a Promise Kept, is an unflinching chronicle of loss that takes a hard look at the state of medical care in the United States. Melissa is on a mission to help patients and medical professionals improve the quality of care in America by raising awareness, facilitating communication, and educating others. They don’t have to go through what her family and mother did. I’d like to welcome you to the show, Melissa. Thanks so much for agreeing to come on and share with us some of your life journey.

00:01:23 – Melissa Mullamphy
Thank you for having me.

00:01:25 – Dwight Heck
You’re welcome. So, Melissa and those that are new to the show, I start off my show with a discussion of a person’s origin story from their earliest recollections to where they are today, because it helps the people listening. It helps me be able to understand where you’re coming from and why you’re on the current journey that you’re on today. So if you could do me a favor, share whatever you feel comfortable with, starting at whatever age your origin story and where you are currently today.

00:01:59 – Melissa Mullamphy
Okay. I was born about an hour from New York City in a small town called Brewster. My parents were blue collar workers. I had one sibling. I still have that sibling. I went to public school systems. From the beginning, I was pretty much a tomboy. I did things that were usually against the grain, especially back in the thing I remember distinctly was in fourth grade, I went to music class and I told the teacher that I wanted to play drums. And he looked at me and this is back in the he said, Girls don’t play drums. And he handed me a flute, and I was terrible at the flute. I practiced for, I don’t know, a couple of months, and I could never get it right. And he heard me practicing one day, and he said, are you the girl that wanted to play the drums? And I said yes. And he said, Go buy yourself a pair of sticks and a pad. And I did. And the funny thing about that is, once I started playing and practicing and taking private lessons from middle school through high school, I was first chair in the band, which was kind of cool, because when you’re first chair, you get to give the other people their parts. So if I wanted to play the drum set, I could play the drum set. And if somebody I could make the boys play the bass drum or the symbols or the timpanies or whatever I felt like for the day. So that was kind of cool. I guess, if I’m honest with myself, I didn’t always follow the rules. I guess I was the second child, so my sister always teases me and says that I got away with a lot more than she did. My dad was an operating engineer for 40 plus years. My mom was a waitress from the day I was born until the night before. We took her to the emergency room. She was waiting tables. So again, blue collar family. My sister and I had chores we had to do all the time. We weren’t afraid of work. We had expectations. We had rules. We had times we had to be home. They weren’t strict, but we had to follow the rules. I think I probably spent, I don’t know, a lot of my high school weekends grounded because, again, I wasn’t always on time or didn’t always follow the rules. And, yeah, we had a good life. We learned the value of a dollar. We weren’t spoiled by any means. But we knew that my parents were hardworking people. And, yeah, that’s sort of our story. That’s my story. That’s kind of the Quick Buy story. I did continue to play the drums. I played in some heavy metal bands, which is kind of funny. A lot of heavy metal bands in New York City. We gigged in New Jersey, we gigged in the boroughs. Locally. It was an all girl band, which people didn’t expect. I think we probably could have got signed. But that’s a luck thing. And we just didn’t get it. I married my high school sweetheart and he joined the Marine Corps. And after he joined the Marine Corps, I went and moved down south with him outside Camp Lejune on Topsill Island for a couple of years, which was very fun, especially in your early twenty s. And when he deployed, I came back up to New York and went to graduate school.

00:06:05 – Dwight Heck
So the thing I like hearing is I find that people’s origins, when they grow up in a blue collar environment and they have rules, but they don’t necessarily always follow them. They skirt them and get in trouble. But they have a pretty normal life. I find when they become young adults into adulthood, though, they’re more grounded. Oh, for sure. People that I communicate with that have parents that are jet setting around or they’re always keeping up with the Joneses or the Smiths, they’re always living a facade. Then their kids try doing the same. They don’t know how to have a grounded life because life isn’t meant to necessarily be perfect. No child’s perfect. As a single dad of five kids, my kids weren’t perfect. They snuck out. They did things. They knew dad was out for the evening working with a client, and they broached the fact. And the only reason they ever got caught is sometimes I’d go to appointments before the age of all this technology and the person wouldn’t be there. So I’d come home, one of the kids weren’t home. Right. It’s like, where is such and such? And then the kids would try other kids would try fabricating stories or whatever. And that’s how people got caught. And I look back at it and think to myself, that’s life, right? Things are going to happen.

00:07:35 – Melissa Mullamphy
I’m glad I had a curfew, because some of my friends that didn’t have curfews are the ones that got in trouble. So at the time, did I want to have to be home by midnight? No. But my mom was a waitress, so she was up because she worked nights, and a lot of times she got home around twelve 01:00 in the morning, and if I was late, she was up and waiting. And my mom, she would ground me and I would sometimes be able to get out of it. But when my dad grounded me, it stuck. So that meant it was pretty substantial, what I did. I never did bad, bad stuff, but I did enough to get in trouble.

00:08:18 – Dwight Heck
You’re a teenager. You had angst and things that you wanted to accomplish. Yeah, with my kids it was tough because when I got divorced, they were very young and had joint custody, and there was mixed messages. So you having that consistency. Whether one was tougher on you and grounding than the other, at least there was consequence. Right. There was some wiggle room with one, there wasn’t with the other. That’s the Yang and Yang of being raised. My kids would go to an environment when they weren’t with me, where, like you said, your friends, it was a free for all. They could do whatever, right? Then when I got full time custody of them, I had to reprogram them because they had a parent switch. Right. They acted a certain way with dad, a certain way with mom, and all of a sudden 100% with dad. And Dad’s a lot more like your dad. This is the way it is story. You know what? This is life. You learn now, because in the future, when you get into trouble, it won’t be me that you’re answering to. It’ll be the police or some person authority, and it could ruin your life. So let’s figure this out. This is a consequence, right? And it is what it is. We have to have defined things to live within, wouldn’t you agree? It’s important.

00:09:45 – Melissa Mullamphy
For sure.

00:09:46 – Dwight Heck
Even in society itself. People say, I wish there was no rules we need to have.

00:09:51 – Melissa Mullamphy
There has to be rules. Yeah. I used to work in downtown Manhattan. My doctors are in the city, my husband works in the city. I stay out of it. As much as possible right now. That’s not a place where you want to be hanging out. And it’s just from what you said, because there’s no accountability for people’s actions and it’s not safe. It’s just not safe.

00:10:17 – Dwight Heck
It’s kind of scary, though, isn’t it, Melissa? You think about even 100 years ago, right in the 1920s, people were still walking the streets carrying guns. There was outlaw justice still. There was sheriffs and legal stuff within our North American society. And people didn’t feel safe. They were protected by the rancher who had hired guns or whatever. And now all of a sudden you move into a more cultured, civilized society where you think you’re safe. And then it seems that in some ways we’re deevolving back to this is the Wild, wild west. We’re going to do things how we want to do it and be damned if you don’t want to listen. Because we have a gun, right? I’m not talking about gun ownership. Whether or not people have the right to own a gun or not own a gun, it’s just that I see a lot of de evolution, even in my country, of people taking things into their own hands. More so after the pandemic. I don’t know if you feel the same way.

00:11:26 – Melissa Mullamphy
I think so, yeah. To me, it’s like a boiling pot of spaghetti that’s just boiled over, especially in New York City. My personal feeling is because there’s no accountability, because we have a revolving system of not keeping people accountable. That’s why you have people that are continuing to commit crimes, because there’s no standards, they’re not being held accountable. And it’s everyone. It’s not one particular person, it’s everyone. And it affects everyone, and it’s unfortunate. And that’s exactly what is happening. People are on subways and they see somebody getting beat up and instead of helping, they’re videotaping it. I don’t know me from a personal experience as a female, if I see somebody getting kicked in the face, I’m not going to videotape it. I’m going to try and help them unless I’m trying not to get shot. But that’s what people do now. They’ll do whatever, as they say, for the Gram, versus trying to help the cops. Hands are tied and there’s good cops, there’s bad cops. But at the end of the day, it’s just the way life is right now.

00:12:51 – Dwight Heck
Live and tear every time you get on public transit. Right? We have that problem here in our train system. We have it on our bus system. People have been in bus shelters and gotten stabbed and there wasn’t even any correlation to knowing that person. Just absolute violence and just stuff like that, where they’ve literally our province, which is for those listening in the states that aren’t realizing a province is the same as your state. Right. Our provinces are a lot bigger than most states. And last year they had to implement our premier, which would be your guys’governor literally mandated and brought an extra police force in the two largest cities, which are Emmett and Calgary because of the amount of violence that had been happening within the trains and the bus system. And it’s not always necessarily people that are homeless or people that are mentally ill, there’s just some bad people out there. I drove terrorizing people the other day.

00:14:01 – Melissa Mullamphy
I was down the city and I had to get off the major deacon and I decided to travel through the side streets to get back up to my part of the woods. And it’s to a point where you got to hope that you get through a light. You don’t want to get stuck at a light in certain areas because there’s so many people that are you can tell that they’re clearly on drugs, they’re clearly mentally unstable, they’re knocking on your windows, they’re coming to your cars or standing in front of your car, they’re drugged out of their mind. And unfortunately, in my opinion, and I’ve worked with Mica populations, mentally ill, chemical abusers, we’re at crisis levels. And instead of helping these people or trying to find them treatment centers or get them off the street, we’re putting up places where they can get clean crack pipes and clean rigs and clean needles and enabling.

00:15:06 – Dwight Heck
We’re doing the same garbage in our city. And those listening that don’t appreciate our opinion, everybody, even you listener or people watching you have the right to your opinion. I don’t necessarily agree with it either. It’s polar opinions from different people within my associations and in my tribe. And literally they’re doing one in our city right now. People have been fighting and people saying, well they got to go somewhere. And within four blocks of this usage site there’s four daycares, there’s a school, and residential is less than a quarter block away from it like an older area of the city. And they’re putting use area there and the police say, oh, we’ll monitor it better and blah, blah, blah, the businesses around there and freaked out the city, did some underhanded stuff and approved it without doing consensus of the area. So now it’s going. I haven’t talked to my friends that are in the area that have businesses, whether or not it’s escalated to court yet. But the city is getting taken the task over it and everybody’s saying, oh, you don’t care about these people. Well sure, but we can’t care about that part of the community and discount the fact that there’s multiple daycares, there’s a school, there’s residential with young people living all around there. And yes, some of those people that are drug addicts that are using and stuff, it would be safer to give them a usage area. But it also puts it into a perspective of where are you solving it? At least if you’re going to give them something, hopefully you’re weaning them off and you’re helping them and you’re giving them addiction counseling. You’re giving them counseling centers. It’s a Band Aid. All you’re doing is trying to centralize where they are as opposed to them being everywhere. But where do you put that safely? Where the general population is safe.

00:17:11 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, no, that’s absolutely the fact. And if you’ve looked at pictures of, like, South Philly, La. Most of the big cities, Chicago, it’s everywhere. We can give out so many Narcans, right? Make them available. But sometimes I know people that have had patients that they’ve gotten two shots of narcan and not come back because now they have the but even those.

00:17:37 – Dwight Heck
Narcon kits, they’re not the easiest to use. Depending on which ones your community, your society buys the narcon kit that I have because I knew people have been saved. Right. All of a sudden, I’ve seen somebody on the road, I’d get out, but it’s not like an EpiPen injector. I wish it was, right? Meanwhile, that person could die because I’m nervous and fuddling around trying to fill up smart solutions, do smart solutions that our society needs to do.

00:18:12 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah. And it’s so bad now because of this veterinary tranquilizer they’re putting in called trank now that narcan doesn’t work with. So now the city in New York is trying to give kits for you to test your drugs to see if there’s this trank in it so the kids don’t take it. It’s like, what are we doing? As somebody that’s worked with people with addictions, had family with people with addictions? I mean, listen, I get it, but to me, it’s just enabling. Like you said, it’s like using a hose on a brush fire, and it’s just spreading. It’s just not good. And there’s been cases, there were cases last year where it was some little pre K school in the Bronx that a little kid picked up a pill that was right around where the play area and it was fentanyl. And they survived, but that’s what it was. What do kids do when you’re five? You put everything in your mouth and they just happened to pick up something that looked like an eminem, put it in their mouth and it was fentanyl. I don’t know. It’s very scary. Even my son is 13 years old and trick or treating, you don’t eat anything until I look at it.

00:19:38 – Dwight Heck
Even then, there’s no guarantee. I know parents now that don’t take their kids trick or treating. We have communities that have safe Halloween. They have been a big hall, or we have some of our malls around here that will do safe Halloween. And just because of the fact of the level of danger, not to mention the fact let’s feed our kids a bunch of sugar in a diabetic world anyway, we could get into lots of different conversations. We’re going to get going on with some other things that I wanted to discuss with you, but this has been a great conversation thus far. So first off, sorry about the loss of your mom. Mike reading up on you yesterday and very emotional, very heartfelt, what you’ve shared out there that I could obviously go and read and look into. So one of the things that I wanted to discuss with you, though, is after the unfortunate death of your mother from ovarian cancer, you started a journey to fight for patient advocacy. Most people have no clue what that is. I do, because I believe in that. And I’ve had other people, again, 20 some years of helping people with their family stuff. Many people need patient advocacy. So can you do me a favor, Melissa? What is patient advocacy and how would it have helped your mother had the opportunity been there for her and you were able to utilize it?

00:21:10 – Melissa Mullamphy
When my mom got sick, I’ll start back. My mom was again for 40 years. She was waiting tables. Very strong, half Italian, half Irish woman, never missed a day’s work, even if she didn’t feel good. And my dad had some heart problems. And we always just kind of thought in the back of your head to never want to say it out loud. It would always be my dad first. Never thought in a million years my mom would ever be diagnosed with cancer at 68 years old. Unfortunately, that happened. And my mom is from the generation that they call the silent generation, where they’re sort of doctor adverse. She didn’t only went to doctors if she absolutely had to, and that’s kind of something we learned the hard way. She wound up calling me one Saturday afternoon, crying. She was telling me that she had a mass. Not a mass, but a bump in her stomach. And honestly, I don’t know how I didn’t see it because I saw her all the time. But she hid it. She wore extra large shirts and me playing doctor. We took her to the emergency room and I thought, no big deal. It’s probably just like an intestinal blockage. They’ll do surgery easy, no big deal. When she was in the emergency room, she kept saying to me and my sister, I know this is bad, I know this is bad. I watched it on Dr. Oz. I think my mom sort of was self self treating for a couple of months before she actually told my sister and I that this thing was growing in her abdomen because again, she was working. So in the emergency room, they did a Cat scan and the doctor came back and his nonverbal communication set it all. And he asked if my parents he could talk to my parents by themselves. And he didn’t say he was for sure that it was cancer, but he said that it was a 23 centimeter mass on her ovary. Given she was postmenopausal and her symptoms, she needed to see her general practitioner or an oncologist right away. And that started our journey with this diagnosis. It took us a couple of weeks to get her in to see an oncologist, and this was back in 2010. So roll the tape forward to 2023. We’re probably looking at four to five months here in the US. But me and my sister just kind of tag teamed and kept calling the oncologist to get her and get her in, get her in. And she finally got in, and I’m jumping around. I didn’t really answer your question on patient advocacy.

00:23:59 – Dwight Heck
No, I prefer this. That’s great.

00:24:02 – Melissa Mullamphy
Okay. She went in and she saw a doctor who my sister and I at the time were not very fond of because she was a straight shooter and she was a female from Iranian descent. She was very smart. But again, from the minute we saw her, she said, if your mother has this, I don’t know if she does, but I think she does, and it’s not a friendly cancer. And she was kind of my sister and I used to call her gloom and doom because we felt that she was very negative. But in the end, every hypothesis, everything that she warned us about, everything she thought could happen, absolutely did happen. And looking hindsight, I appreciated that more of some of the other physicians that we dealt with.

00:25:05 – Dwight Heck
She was very direct.

00:25:07 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yes. And some of the other physicians were not completely transparent, made a lot of mistakes and gave us false hope. So you don’t want to hear it when you’re in it the gloom and doom part. But every single thing this woman said came true, unfortunately. But as you’ll read in the book, she was a great person, and I’m still in touch with her to this day. As far as patient advocacy, where do I start? From the beginning. When my mom got her biopsy, I found out later, when you have ovarian cancer, you have a mass surrounding. That mass is something called asytes. acidis is common with cancer. It’s fluid build up around the tumor. I found out years later that they only tested the asytes, which is the fluid. They didn’t actually get the needle into the tumor itself. Had they got the needle into the tumor itself, they would have found out that it was four different kinds of sarcomas versus the normal platinum treated ovarian cancer. So from the start of my mom’s journey, the chemotherapy protocol that we agreed to put her on was ineffective, and we found that out the hard way. I’ll roll the tape forward. Once she got the diagnosis of cancer, they wanted to do surgery right away, and we wanted to do surgery right away. We wanted to get it out as soon as possible. Unfortunately, her platelet levels were too high pre op. So when you have platelet levels that are really high, it makes you a big stroke risk. So they decided to try three rounds of chemotherapy to shrink the mass, and then that would make for an easier operation. Long term, so you have no choice but to agree to that. So she got the first round of chemotherapy, and she felt okay, was kind of a layup. So we were like, okay, we can do this. Second round started to get some bad symptoms, which are common with chemotherapy. Third round was well before the third round. Let me backtrack. Second round, she started getting what we call wasting disease. Wasting disease for a cancer patient is you never see a heavy cancer patient, an overweight cancer patient, because cancer eats the good cells as well as the bad cells. And she started to lose a lot of weight, lose her appetite, and, quite frankly, waste as well as she was very depressed. And so we said to the oncologist, before we agree to a third round of chemotherapy, we want to do a Cat scan and see if this approach is being effective, because it seems like it’s just making a sick lady sicker. So they said, okay, called in the Cat scan. My mom got the Cat scan before the third round of chemo. My sister brought my mom to the oncologist. The oncologist said, great news. The tumor shrunk in half. So me and my sister like, Holy macro. We’re doing the jake. This is fantastic. So we got my mother the third round of chemotherapy. The week after that, she met with this doctor who was the surgeon that we called the Grim Reaper. And she told my sister that she read my mom’s films with the radiologist, and the cancer had not changed at all. The tumor had not changed at all. In fact, it grew. So at that point, we had just poisoned my mom a third time to a treatment that was having absolutely no effect except slowly killing her as she was suffering. So they read the Cat scan wrong throughout the book every month from the diagnosis, which was May 1, well, pseudo diagnosis till the day she passed away, December 4. I note what happened in that month, the roles my family took, the role I took, you know, because each of us had different roles. My mom’s what what I perceived as how my mom was doing with trying to deal with her own possible mortality, my dad, all the family dynamics. But each month, there was a whoops. There was a mistake. There was a film read wrong. There was miscommunication. There were some really gross errors, like.

00:30:05 – Dwight Heck
A lot of negligence happening.

00:30:07 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, I mean, here’s one. When you have cancer, it’s very common for you to get blood clots. My sister noticed my mom’s breathing was a little weird, so I happened to see the oncologist in the hallway, and I said, listen, can you just come look at my mom? She was in an outpatient radiology appointment, and she wasn’t planning to stay, but I said, can you just take a look at her because her breathing is a little weird? And I happened to see him at the elevator, and he came, and he’s like, I don’t think anything’s wrong, but we’ll admit her just to make sure, et cetera. So that night, my mom was up in the cardiology unit, and I was there after work, and one of the residents came in to ask what her healthcare proxy was. And my mom was she was on Adavan, she had taken Ambien, she was on pain meds. And she said to him, if there’s no hope, I just don’t want anything. And with that, he took his pen and paper and left her room. And I said, Ma I said, you just told him that if you have a cardiac arrest tonight, you don’t want anything? She goes, no, I didn’t. I said yes. She did. And I knew what she meant, but I needed to get him back into the room. And I sat him down, and I said, sir, what did you just hear? And he said to me, Your mom wants nothing. She’s no code. She doesn’t want anything. I said, absolutely not. I said, she doesn’t want events, and she doesn’t want a feeding tube. God forbid things go south if she has a cardiac arrest tonight, you absolutely have to save her. And with that, he updated his record. Then it gets worse. I happen to look down at her arm because I’m leaving. I’m looking at her IVs and stuff, and we’re talking, and I look at her bracelet, and it has another woman’s name on it. Now, your bracelet is your medical record. It’s your meds, it’s your allergies, it’s your diagnosis, it’s everything. And I know exactly the woman’s name that’s on it. I’m not going to say it for her privacy, but I had my BlackBerry at the time. I was tired. It was 930 at night. I didn’t think to take a picture of it, but I did get the head nurse, and boy, did they cut that off very quickly. And that was a big deal. Um, I mean, my mom I said, you were on a cardiac floor. You could have gone down at 02:00 A.m. For an angiogram and not even known it, because at that point, you were somebody else. And you hear those stories happening in the news where somebody gets the wrong knee done for surgery. But this was real.

00:32:46 – Dwight Heck
No, it’s real. Improper surgeries happen all the time. Malpractice insurance is getting tested at a high in North America on a constant basis, and it’s not always because of that. The doctors and surgeons aren’t good. They’re overworked. They’re having their own challenges in their lives that they’re dealing with and trying not to bring that to the job, forget it. Our home life affects our work life and vice versa. It is the reality of life. And we have a government system in North America that just keeps on sugar, coating and brushing everything over, right?

00:33:28 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, it was a big deal. And. They cut it off. But throughout every single chapter in my book, I was in communication with the patient advocate. I went to see the patient advocate personally every month. I was in touch with the patient advocate. She was a lovely person. She always said the right things. But the problem is she has no ability to make change. She’s just a messenger. So a lot of times you’d get a letter that say, thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. We’re going to discuss it with the leadership panel. We’re sorry that your mom went through this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which okay, thank you. But that doesn’t really so it’s a.

00:34:10 – Dwight Heck
Pacifying letter without real any substance to it or teeth.

00:34:15 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah. I’ll tell you in a little while how I found I just went through this again with my dad, but as far as advocacy, this is the deal. A lot of patients are afraid, and I say find your voice. A lot of patients are afraid to push back on doctors. And I don’t mean pushback in an ugly way, in a mean way. I’m just saying ask the questions that might be tougher. Listen to your gut. Be your own advocate, especially if you’re on a lot of medications. Be an active participant in your own health. Meaning I have a lot of millions of GI issues. I know exactly what doctors I’ve seen. I know what tests I’ve had. I know what meds I’ve been on. I know what surgeries I’ve had. That’s very important because you need to be able to say that to any specialist that you see.

00:35:15 – Dwight Heck
All that documentation is important too. Because when you’re dealing with healthcare insurance too I’ve had people on my podcast and explain the nightmares and wrote a book about it and now have a giant group. That all they do. Is deal with the miscommunication and the handling of claims and the lies and deception from the health industry, from the.

00:35:42 – Melissa Mullamphy
My mom ultimately got surgery, and the night before, again, this doctor pulled me aside out of her room, and she’s like, Melissa, your mom’s very sick. She goes, I have a feeling this might be a palliative surgery, meaning I’m afraid we might open her and close her. That happens if they feel like there’s nothing they could do. So just beware that that could happen. I didn’t want to hear that, and it scared the hell out of me, and I kept it to myself. But the next day, my mom was in surgery for 9 hours. So they quote, unquote optimally debulked her, which means they got everything out of her except for microscopic. So we were thrilled. We thought that what couldn’t happen. It actually did happen. And they were successful. And we were in the patient lounge. All of us were crying. My dad was crying. The doctors were crying. Because this was a really complicated case, and it was a really difficult journey, and she survived it. She did a couple of weeks in inpatient rehab, which they had their own rehab facility. And again, here we go with issues, and we could talk for a day about issues. But at one particular point, she called me up, and she’s like, they started me on this new medication, and I’m really dizzy, and I’m like, well, what is it, man? She read it to me, and it was a drug for hypertension. My mom was hypotensive, meaning she had low blood pressure. Her normal blood pressure was 100 over 70. And this physiologist decided to call her in hypertensive meds. Why? If you give somebody that has low blood pressure pressure to lower your blood pressure, they’re going to pass out. So I left work. Thank God I had a great employer. My executive vice president knew what I was going through. He said, you need to leave. Anytime you want to leave, you leave. We’ll sweep up after you. And I did, and I can’t thank them enough. I went over there. I said to the physiologist, why did you put my mom on hypertensive meds? And he basically gave me the whole white coat doctor thing. I’m the doctor. I know what I’m doing. I’m making the choices. Deal with it. Pretty much like that. So with that, I got my car, and I drove to the cardiologist office. Who. She did have a cardiologist at the time. And I walked in, and they’re like, you don’t have an appointment. I’m like that’s. Okay. I’ll wait. I need to speak to Doctor X, because this doctor put my mom on a medication. She’s currently in the hospital, and it has to be discontinued, and he’s not going to do it. So I’ll wait here. And so she came out, and she sat in the waiting room like, who the hell is this girl? And I’m like, this is what happened. This is what they did. And she discontinued it right away. And these are the kind of things that happen every single day, all day long. And before I left to go in my car to go to that cardiologist office, I said to that physiologist, I said, if my mother falls because she passes out and breaks a hip or something worse, you are 100% accountable. And that was kind of the theme throughout her whole illness.

00:38:57 – Dwight Heck
Constant missteps, constant misdirection, constant deception, constant vibrato that I’m look at me, I’m the doctor. I’m this and that. And I’m not picking on doctors because I know a lot of great doctors. In any profession, you can have people that are full of themselves, or they used to be a great doctor, but because they’ve been beaten down so much by a system that doesn’t support them properly, they’re mind numb, they’re emotionally numb, and they lose their sense of compassion and empathy and kindness. I see it all the time, too. I have story after story of that I’ve dealt with in my lifetime of improper medical attention. Even when my four year old granddaughter passed away a few years ago, I’m still convinced there was malpractice. But you know what I mean? They hide things so well. It’s so hard to find the truth. And I was in the hospital constantly seeing her.

00:39:55 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, no, that’s thing like I tell people, if you have a loved one and you have the ability loved one, friend, neighbor, and you can be there, you really have to physically be there. One of the probably most gross errors that they made was after she had the surgery, they had to do cleanup chemo that was for the microscopic that was left. And it was four days inpatient. I was at work. My sister texted me. My sister and I are very polar opposites in a lot of ways. And the subject line of the text was, effing terrible. My sister does not curse. So with that, I Googled the chemotherapy that my mother was being put on, and I printed it, went to the hospital, took one look at my mother. She had every symptom of toxicity poisoning except coma and death. And this was only after one bag. And I called the oncologist. I knew he had a boat. It was Labor Day weekend. And I said, Listen, I need you to come look at my mom. Something’s wrong. She doesn’t look good. He took one look at her, he said, she’s fine. You need to stay off the Internet. Sorry. Do you want to pause just a minute?

00:41:29 – Dwight Heck
No.

00:41:32 – Melissa Mullamphy
So one of the most egregious mistakes that they made was she had cleanup chemo that was going to be done post up. And my sister texted me, I was at work, and she alluded to the fact that it was very bad. So I Googled the medication that my mom was on and ran over to the hospital. I took one look at her, and my mom had every symptom of toxicity, which is poisoning, except coma and death. And I called the oncologist, and I said, please come over and see her before you leave. It was a four day weekend. He had a boat. It was Labor Day, so I knew he’d be unreachable. And he came, he took one look at her, and he’s like, she’s fine. For Connie, we have to go for cure. This is normal. This is all normal stuff. And by the way, Melissa, you need to stay off the Internet. Okay. So he’s a doctor. Unfortunately, me and my sister were like, okay, he’s got to be right? You know, she just survived the surgery, so he must be right. Next day was a Saturday. I’m always very good to every single nurse because to me, they’re the connective tissue to how well you’re going to do in any hospital. They are probably one of the most important people that you see, and 98% of them are great at what they do and want to be doing what they’re doing. And we had a nurse that had seen my mother before, and she called me on my cell phone. She’s like, Melissa, you need to get here. I have orders to hang another bag of chemotherapy. This isn’t the Connie that I know. Basically, she’s putting her neck on the line, and she’s not going to hang a bag because she sees what I saw the day before and was waiting for me to get over there. So I rushed over there, and again, same thing we called. Now we’re seeing the oncologist team member, not the guy that has seen my mom for all of these months. And he came, and this is a whole nother story, but when you see a doctor for a long time or for some kind of severe disease, and one of his partners happens to see you once out of the whole journey, he doesn’t know you. He or she doesn’t know you. They don’t know what you look like when you’re okay. They don’t look like when you’re happy, sad, depressed, your normal way. You speak to people. And again, he looked at her and again said she was fine. And my dad at this point came over, and my family and I were clinging on to hope, and we figured, well, these guys must be right. I mean, they’re the specialists. They do this for a living. So they hung the second bag of chemotherapy. And at that point, the next day, I went and I found my mother flat with her arm hanging off the bed and she was throwing up. And there was no nurses around. And she could have easily aspirated, which a lot of patients that are on chemotherapy do can die and have died from aspiration pneumonia because they choke on their own vomit. And at that point, my head exploded, and I basically said, I cannot trust you, and didn’t leave the hospital. We stayed there until Monday. And Monday, the same doctor that told me to stay off the Internet came into my mom’s room. And at that point, there was a priest there because that’s how bad my mom looked. And my dad was there. Her brother was there. And I was leaning up against the bathroom, and I remember he turned around and looked at me, and he’s like, you’re right. She was toxic. And I’m like listen, I’m like I’m in the reinsurance industry. I used a couple of expletives, but I’m like, this is your job. I said, I Googled this. Now she’s toxic. And when you’re toxic from chemotherapy, it’s not like something where you could take charcoal or some kind of treatment and you’re okay. Like, my mom lost three weeks of her life, like, going in and out of consciousness. She was having delusions. She was hallucinating. She could not move her head without throwing up. And I think at that point, he had kind of lost hope. It stole her spirit. It stole her drive, being poisoned that way. And the surgeon and her team came into the room, and they knew it, and they knew that we were upset and frustrated. And she asked if they could actually write a white paper on this type of med. It’s called ifosomed toxicity. It’s rare, but it can happen. And this was the absolute example of why I tell people, even though it’s not easy and it’s not comfortable, that you have to find your voice. Because I wish that I, at that point, had stuck to my gut, had pushed harder to get I don’t care. Five other doctors to come look at her, not just one guy that met her for ten minutes. I don’t know that that would have changed her outcome, because I found out years later that the type of cancer that she had was very rare. There were four different sarcomas, and it’s basically a death sentence when you have them. But I do wish that I wish that I had not allowed them to tell us that, oh, yeah, it’s okay, she’s fine, because she wasn’t fine, and I knew that, and we just listened because that’s kind of what you do.

00:47:47 – Dwight Heck
Her last weeks, months of her life, would have been a lot different. And I hear this from a lot of people in regards to chemotherapy or going into radiation and how I’ve experienced it with clients, with family. It’s absolutely horrible, the degration of their life just so that they can possibly live. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take the chance if we have educated people helping us make the right decisions. So patient advocacy is very profound in the sense that people don’t realize that they do have a voice. They have more of a voice than they realize, and they can stick up for those they love, and you’re going to get backlash. I know my daughter for my granddaughter passed away for two years, didn’t leave the hospital. My daughter stayed with literally did not leave the hospital except to go outside with her in a wheelchair to help her out, get some fresh air. And there was nurses. You’d hear them grumbling or they’d pull me aside because they knew I was coming every day. You need to talk to your daughter. It wasn’t necessarily nurses. They were relaying what the doctors were, how the doctors were treating situations and circumstances, and they were, like you said, the glue. Right. They’re the backbone. One of my daughters, by the way, is a nurse. She’s a travel nurse and travels around the country going to smaller places that need help. And the horror stories she’s told me as well, and the lack of respect, telling you even that comment about stay off the Internet, and then later telling you, oh, you were right. Well, that changes nothing. Your words are empty. How about you do your job properly like you’re talking about.

00:49:40 – Melissa Mullamphy
Well, that’s it. Yeah, for a long time. It took me ten years to write the book. And, you know, to be honest with you, the first oh, God, I would say the first couple of years after my mom passed, I was a horrible griever, I guess, if you want to say I have a Master’s in clinical psychology. I know all of the stages, all the steps and what. The DSM Five says that you are to be acutely depressed. PTSD, general anxiety disorder. I had it all, and I was too smart to get help, and I needed help, but I kind of felt like I’m the type of person that because my job was so good during the nine month battle my mom fought, I mean, you don’t find employers like that. I felt like I owed them because I was out so much. In and out, in and out. And they actually offered me, after she passed away, short term disability, just to get my head together. And I was too proud to take it. I figured out, Let me work it’ll, take my mind off it. I felt like I kind of owed them, and it wound up backfiring significantly. I sabotaged myself. I was down to 115 pounds. People saw it at work. I was wearing size zero. I would layer my clothes, and it wasn’t because I was purging or anything like that, but I just wasn’t hungry because I was completely a mental head case, and I was taking benzodiazepines, so I could even have conversations with people without crying. I was taking antidepressants, all of which I was familiar with because I worked in mental facilities. I worked in psychiatric emergency rooms. I knew what they did to you. I knew the effect they had on you. I knew the dangers, especially of meds like Xanax, and thankfully, I discontinued them on my own. But for probably a good year, maybe more, I was my own worst enemy, and I had a toddler, so it was a lot, but I managed. But where I’m going with this is I started writing the book shortly after she passed, but it was full of rage. I mean, I’m talking to you now because a lot of time has gone by and I can keep it together because time has gone by and I’ve healed and I sought help. But the first couple of versions, if you read the book, it’s just full of rage, and I had to put it down and then pick it back up when I was at a better place. And I had a bunch of people that I either were either professional editors or even just people that had lost parents through cancer or writers, publishers, whatever, just look at it as far as what their thoughts were on it, as far as editing. And it’s funny. One of the consultants that I had edit my book, she lost her mom to cancer, and she read it and she loved it. And of course she gave me feedback. And if you read my book, I do drop a couple of F bombs. I’m from New York. I’m pretty direct myself and I had to make a decision of whether I was going to be me or sort of sugarcoat me. And I decided to be me. And if you read some of my reviews, cool thing is, and I’m not trying to be egotistical, but people say that they feel like they’re talking to me at their kitchen table because I allow myself to be vulnerable and transparent and real. And I do talk about my. I start the book with a letter to my mother, and it basically tells her what happened to me after she died. How I grieved, how I messed up, how I sabotaged, how I could have easily become addicted to benzodiazepines, how I made bad choices, how I finally did seek mental health care and wound up sticking with the woman for six years. And I did that for a reason. Because I wanted to tell the readers that even with fancy degrees, you can fall down. Even with fancy degrees, you don’t know everything. And I did not know everything and it cost me mentally and physically. So I wanted to share all that. And also I added again, after years of, I guess, calming down about the situation, every chapter I end with what I learned and what I would do differently based on from getting diagnosed to every month of different things that happened, to when she passed away, hospice, what I learned from that and all those things around that. And then all of a sudden we go into a pandemic and I had this crazy thing happen in October of 2020, which you can’t even make it up. I have a bunch of GI problems. I’ve had them forever. I had a bad stomach ache, but I have a high pain tolerance. But I wound up having my husband bring me to the emergency room. I was there 7 hours. They weren’t that busy. Basically it was so bad that I could not reach my phone because if I could, I would have dialed 911. They did an endoscopy. They scoped me about midnight and they found nothing. They were discharging me. And I couldn’t move. I was on morphine. I couldn’t move, but they were discharging me. My discharge papers were written out and at one point I said to one of the nurses, I said, this is effing ridiculous. And I became a code gray. I became a code gray because I cursed. But I was dying. And when I got up to go the bathroom, thankfully I passed out from somewhere between my bed and the bathroom and I woke up and that same nurse that had just unplugged all my vitals, all the vitals and stuff that they’re looking for, the same nurse that told me I was a code gray. She also told me I wasn’t going to get anywhere with that kind of mouth, was flooding my body with fluids because my blood pressure was 70 over 30 and my beats per minute were about at 147 and I was failing. And what wound up happening was, long story short, they called hospitalist. Down the entire time I was in the emergency room, they never took a CBC, which is just a blood count. Had they taken a blood count, they would have seen that my red blood cell count was two. I had an internal bleed. If they had done that, they would have seen that, but they never did that. But damn that. They do that COVID test real quick and they never did a Cat scan either. People that present with abdominal pain, that’s usually the first two things they do. They do some kind of picture and they do some kind of blood work. They didn’t either. They did a scope. And I don’t know how the doctor did not find this, but what I wound up having was something called gastric bobulus. Gastric bobulus is rare. I’m young to have it. But basically my stomach flipped and disconnected from my spleen and my stomach was full of blood. And that’s why I was 70 over 30. My red blood cell count was two. I couldn’t stop throwing up. But in the discharge papers, it says, patient has no abdominal pain. Patients fine. Patients going home. Follow up with your general practitioner. I woke up two days later in intensive care. Thankfully, a hospitalist came down to the Er. He had to change the entire record. I was admitted. I got a Cat scan the next morning. This was the time where you could not have any family or friends in the hospital with you because of COVID which I got. But it was very scary. And all I remember is it was something out of Grey’s Anatomy being run down the hallway. Nurses are putting the cap on my hair, putting IVs in my arm as I’m running down the hallway. And I woke up the next day in intensive care and all I remember is asking the doctor is, did someone call my husband? Because you can’t have anybody there. And basically, if they had discharged me, the surgeon and other doctors that I have told me, I would have died at home. I wouldn’t have woke up the next morning. And so, thankfully, I passed out. And this was in that same hospital.

00:58:57 – Dwight Heck
But there’s malpractice all over the place. Throughout the story, though, everything you’re talking about would make me want to leave. I wouldn’t live there anymore. I’m just being honest with you. That is so broken.

00:59:12 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, it gets worse. And I’ll tell you why in a minute. I wrote the CEO of this hospital. I wrote the person in charge of the emergency room. You get all the flowery wording letters back. We’re sorry. We’re going to do this. We’re going to make this our teachable moment. We’re going to learn from your case. Yada, yada, yada. I did call a medical malpractice lawyer in my case. The fact that I didn’t die, they’re not really interested in it. And my thing is, it’s not even about the money. It’s just more of the utter shining.

00:59:52 – Dwight Heck
Light on the ignorance. And it’s not even ignorance, the stupidity, because they should know better and their.

00:59:59 – Melissa Mullamphy
Job, but it’s also it’s just gross negligence, because how do you have a surgeon scope you when they scope you? I’ve had them done 20 times in my life. They put the scope, which has a camera on the end of it, into your stomach. How do they not see that your belly is full of blood and also done a 360 and has turned the opposite way and your spleen is removed? How does that even happen?

01:00:22 – Dwight Heck
Well, it’s just like with your mom, too, them not seeing and finding things either, right?

01:00:27 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah.

01:00:29 – Dwight Heck
I’d leave the state.

01:00:32 – Melissa Mullamphy
This isn’t a different state. It isn’t a different state. And the good news is that I have very good insurance. So a lot of the stuff I do go into the city for especially important stuff. But recently, at the end of December, my dad passed here.

01:00:48 – Dwight Heck
About that.

01:00:49 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, I appreciate that. My dad, he would have been 82 this April. He was diagnosed congestive heart failure 17 years ago. And for that kind of diagnosis, 17 years is a good life. He had a pacemaker defibrillator that was put into him that was never used. Thankfully, he never asked anybody for help. He was putting batteries in his truck in November. He was picking up all the leaves on his lawn in November. He was always doing stuff that me and my sister were like, dad, let’s help you. Don’t get up on the roof in 100 degrees and tar the roof. But that was just my dad. That’s his generation. They didn’t ask anybody for anything. He became sick the middle of December, and he was end stage congestive heart failure. It really sucked. But the pump had been going wrong in his heart for a long time. But now it was the electric. But we didn’t know that at the time. And it’s a long story, but he was an impatient twice in the month of December. The the worst part about it is, you know, a couple things. And this is where now my patient advocacy and my podcast interactions media everything I’m doing all day long, because it’s not only not acceptable, it’s disgusting. On Christmas Day, his defibrillator went off a couple of times, and me and my sister were there, and we called the ambulance. The ambulance came and he went into VTAC, right. With the ambulance there. They gave him stuff in the ambulance, brought him to the hospital. They stabilized him at the hospital with the stuff for the pace of his heart. And once they got his pace squared away, he’s ready to get out of there. That was just the nature of my dad. And he knew that he wasn’t well, but he wasn’t really willing to give up. And we talked to very smart people from Columbia, and they asked us if we wanted to consider putting in a heart pump. And my dad didn’t want to go down that road. He was 81 years old. It was a very big surgery. The rehab would be very difficult. He wasn’t a city guy, so he said, no, just give me medicine, I just want to go home. And they said, you might need palliative care, home in the house, that kind of thing. And we were in agreement with all of that. And we started engaging those resources the day after Christmas. We start on the 26 December engaging those resources, social workers, doctors, hospice representatives, and we sit down with palliative care people on the 27th. And he just wants to go home. He wants to live the rest of his days at home with us. And unfortunately, they didn’t have the staff. That’s what we were told. They didn’t have the staff, they didn’t have the resources, and they couldn’t make it happen. So we just kept showing up and following up. And it got to the point where the people that were in charge of making these things happen were two doors down from his room. I was very nice. I would knock on the door, excuse me, do you have an update? You know, no, no, we don’t have anything at this time. So it got to the point where I was starting to get aggravated, really aggravated. And I told my sister, I said, you know what, I’m going to go sit at the elevator and watch. She’s going to be leaving at 430 because it’s the end of the business day and we’re still not going to have an answer, and sure as hell who do I see? The person in charge of getting my dad the hospice stuff in order was leaving without giving us any answers. So at that point, they said they were going to give us a private room. And he was starting to fail rather quickly. And I told my sister, I said, we’re not going home. And she’s like, yeah, we’re definitely going home. I said, Alicia, we’re not going home. I said, this isn’t happening. I could feel it. We’re not going home. And with that, we got a private room. And he started to actively die. And I had asked the doctors to put pain meds, benzodiazepines, comfort meds in his regular regiment four days before he died, and not where he has to ask for them, because I knew he was not in the condition to ask for him, nor was that the way he was, and they didn’t do it. So the day before he passed away, I slept over my sister and. I both slept over. And again, the doctors failed to put in the orders for Comfort Meds. So here I go again. And when my mom died, she was so weak from cancer. While I had terrible images for years of watching that, watching my dad was a thousand times worse because I don’t know if it was because he was a man. I don’t know if it was because it was sudden. I don’t know if it was because he was fighting it, but it was horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. And at one point, the night before he passed away, my sister and I asked one of the nurses, please, please call the on call doctor and get us something. Get us something, please. And they called, and they got a pill called in. My dad didn’t have the ability to swallow anymore. He had the death rattle from the day before, and they called in a pill. I’m like, what freaking planet are you guys on? And make a long story short, the entire night was horrifying. And the head nurse came in about 08:00 the morning of the 30th, and she looked at me and she said, I wish you and your sister had made this decision a day ago. And I said, and that’s where I just I was tired. I hadn’t slept. I was crying. I said, we made it on Tuesday, officially. We started the process on Monday. This was Friday morning at 08:00. I said, Are you out of your beep beep beep mind? And with that, a palliative care nurse practitioner came in. She took one look at me, took one look at my dad, and she said, okay, we’re going to call in the medication. And I said, how long? And she said, five minutes. I said, no, really, how long? And she’s like, five minutes. And it took about an hour and 15, which after what I had already witnessed for 72 hours, an hour wasn’t going to change much. And they eventually did get him the Comfort Meds. The doctors, two of the doctors that I liked and that were consistent apologized to my sister and I in the patient lounge. But at that point, it was too late.

01:08:27 – Dwight Heck
We had already their apologies are empty, just like they were with your mom. Yeah, with you. It is disgusting.

01:08:37 – Melissa Mullamphy
Like you said earlier, it’s not acceptable. It’s not okay. And right now, I’m in the process of discussing with the people that are in charge at this facility, because this is not the first person this has happened to. This is not the last person this has happened to. And it’s going to continue to happen, and they need to have some accountability. And I’m not afraid to tell my story. I’m not afraid to write letters. I’m not afraid to sit on the other side of a table from a CEO, because they’re a person just like me. But I am not going to have my dad be their AHA moment. Their learning experience.

01:09:24 – Dwight Heck
Yeah, those crap letters that saying that this is going to be their teaching moment. But what can somebody immediately start doing that to make a difference? Friends and take up raising the awareness mantle themselves with all this stuff that’s going on? People that are listening to this, what can they immediately do? Melissa.

01:09:46 – Melissa Mullamphy
This is what I tell a lot of people is there’s a couple of things you have the terrible stories, like I just told you three of them, right? But if you’re actively sick, if you’re actively ill, if you have a loved one that’s actively going through something, first thing I always tell people to do is have your patient record, have your patient file. If you don’t have a hard copy, get it electronically. You need to have it. You need to read it. I found I combed my dad’s for a month. There was about a 50% error rate in his file. They wrote, the emergency room doctor said that he did not take his meds as he was supposed to. It was complete crap. He absolutely did. In fact, the meds that they said that he did not take and that he was not compliant on, he wasn’t even on before this admission. They copy and paste. The other thing is, again, know your disease process, know what you have, know what doctors you’ve seen, know what medications you’re on, know what they’re for. A lot of times people don’t know this. And I’ve done enough podcasts with even doctors that I know what they look for. When you go, you have that ten minute window when you’re speaking to them. They want to know what’s your history? What medications have you had, what tests have you had, what surgeries have you had? If you have a symptom, when does it happen? What makes it worse, what makes it better? If you spend your time in a doctor’s office and you’re having to think of those things, you’re not going to have the time to give the doctor the full picture. So if you can go prepared with stuff like that, you’re going to get better value out of your visit, better value out of your appointment. The other thing I always tell people is that you’re in charge of your health care, you’re in charge of your insurance, you’re in charge of the doctors that you choose. Recently, I had to find another doctor for reasons that you can imagine, and on the internet, you could find out what people think of doctors. I mean, I’m very pro healthcare provider.

01:12:02 – Dwight Heck
We have a medical system here where you can go and it rates CMD, and it actually has a scoring system. And people can leave comments. The medical industry hates it, but that.

01:12:15 – Melissa Mullamphy
Oh, well, yeah, that’s what I tell people. It’s like if you’re research the doctor.

01:12:20 – Dwight Heck
You’Re seeing honestly, and don’t be afraid to say, hey, I want another opinion. Oh, I want another opinion. And if they’re smug with you, their diagnosis is smug. Right. If their attitude and their personality is smug, the way they run their diagnosis and their advice is smug and run the other way.

01:12:43 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah. And they should want that second head opinion. That’s the way I look at it. They should want that.

01:12:50 – Dwight Heck
Don’t have a second opinion from a doctor that’s in the same practice.

01:12:54 – Melissa Mullamphy
Absolutely.

01:12:56 – Dwight Heck
I hear people say, oh, we had somebody else. I’ll call on my colleague. No, you’re not going to call on your colleague. I’m going to get somebody that’s not even in your office, that doesn’t even know you. May know of you, but there’s no tie. So that there’s unbiased opinion based on experiences.

01:13:15 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah. And don’t think that they’re not all connected, because most of them are.

01:13:19 – Dwight Heck
Absolutely. And depending on the community you’re in. Absolutely.

01:13:23 – Melissa Mullamphy
Oh, yeah. And you have to be your own advocate. Like, if you’re going to buy a car and you do that research to see which car you want based on feedback or how the engine works or whatever, why wouldn’t you do that? For what doctor you’re going to pick? Like, for me, I had an example where I had crohn’s and I needed to get my colon out. The doctors close to where I live, probably 60, 70% of them, said I was going to come out of surgery with a bag. I didn’t want a bag. My nephew had a bag. I just was hoping I would not have to get one. I got another opinion in the city and the doctor said to me, I’m 95% confident that you’re not going to wake up with a bag. And I didn’t. So just for me, getting that second opinion and trusting this woman instead of having to have three surgeries to fix, if you get a bag, I only had one and I was in and out in five days.

01:14:24 – Dwight Heck
It’s difference of a person being compassionate, because my brother in law had the same surgery for colitis and every year he’d get scoped and they found cancer. So he was told by most people, because we have the committee of they people listening, I’m doing air quotes. The committee of they thinks they take other people well, this person had this surgery, they’re having a bag. You’re going to have that happen. And so my brother in law thought for sure, and he had a couple of doctors that come in and one of the doctors said, you know what? I’m pretty sure I can do it. It’s going to be a little bit longer, but I’m pretty sure I can do it. You’re not going to have a bag when you woke up. And even though he gave him hope, but it was the confidence of that doctor and the body language tonality, like my sister said, we just knew that he was genuine, that he was real. Brother in law had the surgery, he’s got no bag, and that surgery is over, like, 1015 years ago.

01:15:23 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, that’s what this woman said to me. She looked at me one it was a Friday, I was really sick, and she’s like, okay, we need to do this. And she’s like, when can you and she asked me, she goes, when do you want to do it? And I said, okay, well, when can you do it? Because, of course, I was a little scared. She goes, how about next Tuesday? And I’m like, okay. And it was just that easy. And again, if I had not done my due diligence, I know in fact, I’m 80% confident that I would have had the three surgery deal where they give you the bag, then they have to do two other surgeries to correct that. The Internet could be when my mom was sick, it was not always your best friend because you saw a lot of the bad horror variant cancer. But at the same time, it did give us information that was not readily available. Like, for example, when she was toxic. Same thing with my dad.

01:16:25 – Dwight Heck
Take it with a grain of salt. Anything you search on the Internet, though, you should always look at different. I tell people, don’t click the first things. I don’t care what you’re researching, what service you’re using, click on it and read other stuff. And then we’re so emotional because of what we’re reading about medical stuff. Get somebody that’s not directly tied to it to read the same thing. Maybe it’s a close friend. They’re tied to your emotion, but they’re thinking of it differently. They approach and visualize and internalize things differently and read the same thing you’re reading and say, so, John, Sally, what do you think of what this is saying and then have a discussion about it? Too many people self diagnosed over the Internet, and they’ve never read more than one thing.

01:17:12 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, absolutely.

01:17:14 – Dwight Heck
You cannot do that. The de facto standard of people reading an article about anything I don’t care what it is, or listening to a media outlet about what’s going on in the world. That’s one opinion based on their colored lens, right? You need to continually people listening or watching. You need to be an advocate for yourself or for others when you’re researching, research more than one thing. Talk to other people. See what their thought process is. Develop a tribe of people that you trust that will give you an honest, straight up opinion and not blow sunshine up your ass.

01:17:51 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah. And that’s sort of, I think, where we are now with post pandemic medicine. I know you guys have your issues. We have a lot of issues. There’s a lot of nurses that are here that have lost their jobs in America, that have built, I want to say, like coalitions, and are challenging the standards, challenging the norms, sharing things that.

01:18:20 – Dwight Heck
The nurses take all the bullshit, they take all the crap. I tell people in a normal hospital hierarchy, the doctor is the king and he’s dictating to his servants. The nurses, the LPNs, the nurses aides, they do all the shit, sloppy work, have to put up with all the garbage, the mistreatment, but the doctor gets all the accolades for ten minutes.

01:18:47 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah.

01:18:49 – Dwight Heck
And the whole hierarchy of the medical system in North America and really a lot of places, the world is broken. It is completely broken. And we need to stand up and start telling people this. And while you’re on my show and I talk to people about it all the time, right. I read people’s body language all the time when it comes to medical professionals. And you can tell when they’re full of garbage, too. Your radar, your spidey sense goes off if you’re actually listening for it.

01:19:19 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah. And that compassion element. Listen, when I was in the hospital, October 2020, all the nurses were most of them had PTSD. They were overworked, underpaid. I’d asked a couple, hey, has the hospital ever bought you lunch? Any combat pay? Because with the pandemic and they basically told me the only people that gave them anything were, like, local restaurants. Nothing came from the hospital. And I make sure I thanked every one of them. Whether I’m an inpatient or whether I’m visiting somebody, I always try and help out the best I can because they’re completely understaffed. I saw that especially the end of December with my dad, where a nurse might have ten patients, which patient to staff ratios, that’s very dangerous. And I saw it firsthand.

01:20:14 – Dwight Heck
The burnout is huge with nurses. So then you get the older nurses that get to a point where they’re mentally and emotionally numb, just like it happens with many medical professionals, and then they end up being put in charge of the other nurses. Or my daughter. I’ll talk about units where there’s five, six nurses on, and the charge nurse isn’t doing her job, is sitting there or isn’t even present. And there’s two nurses that are compassionate, kind and caring, doing all the work, while the other three sit there and visit, you know what I mean? And are doing shoddy work. It doesn’t mean they were always like that. But the system is killing them, making them emotionally dead.

01:20:53 – Melissa Mullamphy
Right? Yeah. And the other thing is that for us, there’s so many because they’re short and staff, they have a lot of traveling nurses or per diem nurses. And here’s the thing that I saw in the first inpatient state, he was in just a regular, I guess just inpatient sick unit, right? The next time he was in a cardiology unit. But in seeing the different nurses, most, I would say at least 50% of them did not pull paycheck from the hospital. They were like temps or per diem nurses. So if you’re working in cardiology on Monday, you’re working in Med surge, on Tuesday, you’re working in I don’t know, dialysis on Wednesday. Every single one of those specialties has Idiosyncrasies and stuff you need to know to do your job effectively. And some of these nurses, and it’s not their fault, they’re just doing more with less because they’re just overworked and.

01:21:56 – Dwight Heck
They don’t have time. It’s all Band AIDS. It’s all temporary. It’s not healing the situation, it’s covering it. I hear this all the time consistently, like everybody in the US brags about Canada’s health care system. We have our challenges here, our national health care system. And what the media wants to tell you there is that it’s perfect. BS is perfect. I live here. It’s got its own challenges, and it’s falling apart across our country, so much so that if you travel from province to province, they’re recommending that you have travel insurance, even though they’re supposed to be national health care to cover you. There are certain circumstances of horror stories where something is required and it’s not getting dealt with. And even though they’re not supposed to do it, you could be handed a bill with that province when it’s supposed to be covered under the National Health Care Act. So you know what I mean? I’ve watched the evolution of our health care. One of the times it was the shining thing in the world was our health care in Canada. But it’s not that way anymore. Now it’s just used as, here’s a bouquet of flowers, right? And we got it wrapped in some paper, but if you take the paper off, it’s all rotten at the bottom, you know what I mean? We’re only seeing the top beautiful roses, but the rest hasn’t been taken care and maintained. It’s a facade, right? So to hear the stories of what I hear and you’re not the only person that I’ve talked to. I’ve had people on my show that have dealt with so many different circumstances. I see that coming here and evolving way quicker than I’d like it to. And patient advocacy being the observant and making sure that we ask good questions and don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself. I tell people that all the time, well, the doctor is going to they’re going to take it out on the patient or once I leave or they won’t listen, we’re going to get blackballed. Well, better to be blackballed for sticking up for something you believe in. And like in our city, I don’t know, it’s five, six hospitals because we’re 1.5 million people. We’re obviously not as big as where you come from. But you know what? There’s other choices. There’s other places. Leave this city, go to a neighboring city. They got five, six hospital, you know what I mean? Never say never. Don’t comply, and don’t lay on the side of the road and give up and die based on the fact of somebody’s so called profession, because they went through and got a degree in medicine, and they’ve practiced this long doesn’t mean crap. Are they a good person? Are they kind? Are they a patient advocate themselves? They need to have that training in school and they don’t get it.

01:24:45 – Melissa Mullamphy
Right? Well, that’s the whole compassion thing. Like, I’ve seen my general practitioner for years, and he’s retiring. He’s, I don’t know, his 60s maybe. But he and I’ve I’ve talked to other doctors. You know, right now, a lot of these practitioners are seeing patients every ten minutes. You can’t do your job in every every ten minutes. That’s just impossible.

01:25:07 – Dwight Heck
They give them 15 minutes here. The GP got 15 minutes. That’s it.

01:25:13 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah.

01:25:14 – Dwight Heck
No more than two things to discuss with that person.

01:25:18 – Melissa Mullamphy
And that’s more reason why you have to be prepared, because that’s the only snapshot that you have.

01:25:23 – Dwight Heck
I make a list if I go.

01:25:25 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, that’s the scary thing. And primary care, a lot of medical students now, I just wrote a white paper on it the other day. They’re not going into primary care because there’s more overhead and they’re paid the least. But the terrible part about that is here with a lot of insurance policies, you need your GP to write a referral for you to see that specialist. So they’re usually patients first appointment. So not only are they that important, but I think the statistics now are about 40% of their job is administrative because of these referrals that they have to write. So that’s another thing I could go on forever.

01:26:10 – Dwight Heck
Well, we could keep on going for hours. We’re already well over the time that I promised you, we wouldn’t be doing this, but I appreciate you giving some extra time and sharing your knowledge and your experiences. The last thing I’m going to ask you, and then we’re going to wrap this up, is if you had to give our listeners one last closing message, Melissa, what would you tell them in regards to giving a heck and never giving up?

01:26:39 – Melissa Mullamphy
I’ve been told from a lot of people, friends, family, close people, people that probably shouldn’t tell me these things, miss, you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re not going to change anything. Nothing’s going to change in the hospital. Health care is what it is. Almost like you’re not going to make a difference. I can tell you, and it’s not an egotistical thing. I am making a difference. I talk to people globally. I talk to people like yourself. I spread my message. I’m working on an application now that’s that’s going to be giving tips when you go to a doctor’s appointment. But as far as giving a heck, I would just say stick to your goals. It’s not always easy at the time. It’s not easy to be the person that is maybe going against the grain and not just being okay with people’s mistakes or holding people accountable. It’s not easy to be maybe perceived as the difficult person or the person that is not just going to like you said, lay down and take it. But my goal and my journey is to help others and keep speaking to people so they can find their voice and so they don’t wind up like my mom did or my dad did or me almost did. And that there are things that you can do to help your health care outcome in many circumstances. Just keep at it and you’ll get there. It’s not an easy road, but you got to keep at it.

01:28:35 – Dwight Heck
Yeah, well, anything worth its value in life that you’re trying to achieve is outside of our comfort zone. I don’t care what it is, right? So people listening are watching. Do what you need to do and understand there might be some discomfort, but guess what? The person that you’re dealing with as an advocate, guess what they’re going through four times worse than what you’re going through. And if it has to do with yourself and you have to be your own advocate, just realize that it could be giving you that extra opportunity to survive, to live, to prosper again. So don’t be afraid to challenge the medical industry again, for those listening or watching, there are a lot of great people in the medical industry, right? I know a lot. I have clients that are nurses. I have clients that are in the medical industry. There are some really good people, but there’s a lot of shitty people in all professions. So if you run into somebody that’s garbage and doesn’t want to listen to you, go find somebody else. I know that isn’t necessarily easy. There’s cities in our country where, like, my daughter lives in one of the cities in neighboring province. They’ve been there for over two years and still don’t have a doctor. They’re on a waiting list. There’s such a shortage of medical professionals, right? So they go into a walk in clinic where they see somebody. There’s no consistency, there’s no compassion. In and out, right? Here, take a pill. No questions, no whatever. So that’s another thing I’ll end up saying, too. If your doctor is always prescribing you stuff and not really present in the conversation, not asking you questions, and always writing these scripts run because you don’t know what that script is really going to do, because it’s easy for them, absolutely push you out the door. They’re going to get their clinic or wherever they’re at is going to get paid and next.

01:30:35 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yeah, that’s exactly it. It’s all of that. And we just have to give the people not to be afraid to again find their voice. In this stage of the game, you absolutely have to do it. And you’re not always going to agree with everybody. Everybody’s not always going to agree with your approach. I always approach every situation calm, cool, and collective. And I did in my dad’s case, until I could no longer be. It’s funny because me and my sister again were very different in that aspect, and she has her things that she’s very strong in. I have my things that I’m very strong with, and that’s why I think we work well together as a team. But you just have to do it. You don’t have the option anymore.

01:31:31 – Dwight Heck
Yeah, exactly. So our time is up. I want to respect our listeners and your time. However, before we end, can you please tell the listeners what’s the best way to reach you?

01:31:42 – Melissa Mullamphy
My website is www.Melissamalanfi.com. I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, and it’s just my name. And I blog a lot on different emerging issues that are going on. A lot of it’s healthcare.

01:32:00 – Dwight Heck
Well, you have it on your website. On your website. You have an actual blog area?

01:32:05 – Melissa Mullamphy
Yes, I do.

01:32:08 – Dwight Heck
I checked it all out. Of course. I will make sure that goes into the show notes for the new listeners. Go to Give A Heck. That’s Give A Heck and Go and hit the podcast portal button. You’ll see Melissa’s face, and below that you’ll see the abbreviated show notes. And I’ll make sure that her links for all her social media as well as her website is present there so that you can reach out and give a heck and realize that you can learn to live a purposeful life for others and live a purposeful life for yourself and that you don’t have to just sit back and let life control you. You can be the conductor in your own life.

01:32:52 – Melissa Mullamphy
Sure.

01:32:53 – Dwight Heck
Any last closing comments?

01:32:56 – Melissa Mullamphy
Do your best to stay healthy, research stuff and try and stay out of the hospitals.

01:33:04 – Dwight Heck
Yeah, that’s good advice. So thanks so much for being on Give A Heck, Melissa. I appreciate your time and sharing some of your experiences so that others too, can learn. It is never too late to give a hack.