Could this be the future of our medical care?
A man who saws off his own leg because he couldn’t afford to pay the hospital to amputate it for him.
Zheng Yanliang, 47, was told that he had one month to live after being diagnosed with severe arterial thrombosis in both legs. However, he could not pay the hospital fees to receive surgery. So, Mr. Zheng decided to act on the bad news and perform a do-it-yourself operation.
A woman drops her baby on the grass outside of a clinic.
Irma Lopez and her husband went to a clinic seeking help for the woman’s labor pains, but they were turned away from the health center by a nurse. Only a few minutes later, her water broke and she gave birth to a son, her third child, on her own, outside the clinic, as her husband pleaded with the nurse to call for help.
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Mrs. Lopez, who is of Mazatec ethnicity, and her husband had walked an hour to the clinic from the family’s one-bedroom hut in the mountains of northern Oaxaca.
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The case has pointed out the persistent discrimination against Mexico’s indigenous people, and the shortcomings of its healthcare system.
In 2011, nearly one in five women in the state of Oaxaca gave birth in a place that was not a hospital or a clinic, according to Mexico’s census.
A man operates on his own head.
Dwain Williams of Ft. Lauderdale used to have a big mass on his forehead from an accident years ago. He says it was embarrassing because people always stared at him. When he went to a surgeon to have it surgically removed, the self-employed tree cutter discovered that even with insurance the price tag was way too high.
A He-She tries to make himself a She-He.
When former soldier Roland Mery was told that he had to wait two years for gender reassignment surgery, he decided that his 61 years of being a man was enough. The married father of four told his wife that he had a headache and walked to the bathroom of their home with a bottle of painkillers and a homemade surgery kit.
A 63-year-old man from Glendale, CA was taken to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center after he tried to operate on his bulging hernia with a butter knife. Police arrived on the scene to find him naked and reclined in a lounge chair on his patio, smoking a cigarette, with a 6-inch butter knife sticking out of his abdomen.
At midnight on March 5, 2000, after 12 hours of continual pain, Ramírez sat down on a bench and drank three small glasses of hard liquor. She then used a 15 centimeter (5.9 in) kitchen knife to cut open her abdomen in a total of three attempts. Ramírez cut through her skin in a 17 centimeter (6.7 in) vertical line several centimeters to the right of her navel, starting near the bottom of the ribs and ending near the pubic area. (In comparison, a typical C-section incision is 10 cm long, horizontal and well below the navel, the so-called “bikini-line incision.”) After operating on herself for an hour, she reached inside her uterus and pulled out her baby boy. She then severed the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors and became unconscious. She used clothes to bandage her wound after regaining consciousness, then sent one of her older sons to find help.
While these are remarkable because they are not only extreme but rare, how long before they become only extreme with the government in charge of our medical care?