How to Stay Out of My Emergency Room: Master Your Health and Find Joy in Life by Balancing the Power of Your Mind

By Mona Balogh

After twenty-seven years treating patients in emergency rooms, Dr. Mona Balogh noticed a trend: from heart failure to addiction, people chronically use ERs to address disease. These "frequent flyers" are ER regulars with little understanding of their illness or how to help themselves. Dr. Balogh knew these patients deserved more from medicine—there had to be a better way.

In How to Stay Out of My Emergency Room, Dr. Balogh combines Western and Eastern approaches to show us how to overcome harmful mindsets that prevent us from recovering. By applying the Eastern philosophy of opposing forces and dynamic tension with the time-tested methods of The 12 Steps and Vipassana, she shows us how to incorporate meditation to choose a healthier lifestyle. If you or someone you know feels stuck in an unhealthy rut, this book will help you find the right strategy to conquer a vicious cycle and discover your best self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781544509082

Book preview

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Copyright © 2020 Mona Balogh

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0908-2

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This book is dedicated to you because I know you can do it.

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Contents

Introduction

Part I: Understanding

1. Frequent Flyers

2. Power Plays

3. Why You Should Think about Weird Stuff Like Yin & Yang

4. Everyone Does These Crazy Balancing Acts

5. Enter the Higher Self

Part II: Doing

6. Here’s How You’ll Change Your Stubborn Brain

7. The Reboot

8. Here’s How You’ll Overcome Your Destructive Habits

9. Overcoming Bad Eating and Exercise Habits

10. Overcoming Addictions

11. How You Can Repair Your Relationships

12. What to Do When You Can’t Do It Alone

13. Yin & Yang for Caregivers

Conclusion

Resources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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Introduction

In my ER, we call them our frequent flyers. They touch down again and again from ambulances in the middle of the night. They’re wheeled in again and again by desperate, frustrated family members. We may even get to know them by name. We may hardly need to look at their charts.

They have congestive heart failure, but they ate a whole bag of chips. They have diabetes, but failed to take their insulin. They overdosed on Vicodin. They drank themselves into unconsciousness. They didn’t change the bandages on their bedsores for a week. They laid in bed for a week and lost all their muscle strength, so they fell. They cut themselves.

Again.

This book is mostly for frequent flyers. It’s mostly for people who have so lost their personal power to a disease, a habit, or a destructive behavior that they end up in my ER every six months. Or every month. Or every week.

Mostly that means people with chronic conditions like diabetes, dangerous allergies, heart conditions, obesity, or autoimmune diseases. Conditions that could be controlled with things like diet and exercise, but are not.

It also means people who have knowingly or unknowingly become addicts: opioid addicts, sex addicts, food addicts, alcoholics, heavy smokers, you name it. Among addicts, I include people trapped in habitual violence: gun violence, gang violence, domestic violence.

Maybe you see yourself on one of those lists.

If so, this book is here to give you strength. It’s here to give you a truly new kind of personal power. It’s here to offer you an entirely new way to see the world and your place in it. It offers a new path forward, both mentally and physically. A path that works for anyone.

Even you.

Maybe you’re not a frequent flyer, but you’re the caring husband, wife, friend, brother, sister, or parent who needs to understand what’s really happening and why, and learn to cope. You might even be a professional: a doctor, nurse, or CNA looking for a new way to empower your patients, and protect yourself, too. If so, this book is also for you. You need to understand your frequent flyer—and please read chapter 13 for caregivers.

But Everyone Has This Issue

Ultimately, however, this book is for everyone.

Seriously, everyone.

Because I do not know a single person, including myself, who has not struggled to overcome a habit that damages their health. Who has not at some point felt weak in the presence of a bad habit. Who has not at some moment fought to maintain the balance of personal power that leads to health.

Not one.

Think, for a moment, what that means.

Destructive habits are strangely woven deep into the human condition—curiously fundamental to the daily wrestling match that constitutes life itself.

Whether we are aware of these habits, or whether they operate stealthily beneath our conscious minds, we must all learn to see and confront them every single hour of our lives, right up until the hour we die.

Not Another Load of Advice

This is not another book about how to eat or drink or exercise. You already know how to do those things. I’m not one more doctor hectoring you to take your meds and follow your diet.

Instead, this book looks at the dark and the light halves of human existence. It examines the eternally opposing forces that lead us all to harm or to help ourselves, day in and day out. It explores the unacknowledged power plays which make every one of us prey to destructive habits.

Only by understanding these forces can we control and balance them. The forces themselves will never be eliminated.

I do not pretend to originality. The ideas here are not just old, but ancient. You might say they’ve been clinically proven by billions of trials over thousands of years. People much smarter than me have been thinking about this problem throughout the millennia. Those people found solutions—we just need to use those solutions in a modern context.

How This Book Is Put Together

Here’s a quick look at how this book will proceed.

We’ll start by looking at how and why certain people—maybe you—end up returning to the ER month in and month out. I’ll also explain how I ended up developing the ideas in this book to try and help.

Then we’ll look deep into those internal and external power plays I mentioned. The ones that drive us all to do things we know are bad for us, and which often alienate those we love best.

We’ll use the ancient symbol of yin and yang to visualize the issue more clearly. The yin/yang symbol is much more than a common theme in Asian art—it truly illustrates the way the forces of change, of weakness and strength, illness and health, balance out in our lives.

Along the road, we’ll locate and understand what is called our Higher Self. Trust me, we all have a Higher Self, and it never leaves us, at least until we die. Once acknowledged and understood, we can use our Higher Self to retrain our brains with some very practical mental exercises.

These mental exercises, which begin in Part II, will inevitably improve your health. I promise.

Finally, we’ll take a look at the various options, like twelve-step programs, for those who cannot fully help themselves.

One warning: as we explore these subjects, we will encounter some hard truths.

Some very hard truths.

But without confronting those truths, no progress can be made.

The Bottom Line

Before we get to those truths, however, let me cut to the bottom line.

I’m an MD with twenty-seven years of experience in the emergency rooms of large hospitals, thirty-four years if you include medical school and residency. I’ve seen literally tens of thousands of patients. I’ve studied both Western and Eastern approaches. Here is what I have learned:

Health is life. Life is a precarious balancing act. But that balance is possible to achieve by anyone who still has their cognitive abilities.

Anyone.

No matter how sick you may be. How immobile. How addicted to pizza, donuts, cigarettes, tequila, Demerol, pistols, razor blades, soft couches in front of TVs, or the bright lights of the ER at midnight.

You too can regain power over your health.

You too can become independent.

You too can say goodbye to ambulance drivers and hospital orderlies.

With any luck, you may never have to look up into my masked face, or feel the touch of my gloved hands again.

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Part I

Part I: Understanding

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Chapter 1

1. Frequent Flyers

The ER Is Their Second Home

It’s midnight, and a brief calm has fallen over my ER.

We had a surge early in the shift, but all the patients are now fairly stable and tucked in for the night, so we’re actually sitting around the nurses’ station chatting. As always, the room’s a little cold, with a slight hum from the overhead fluorescents.

Then James arrives.

James makes his entrance comatose, in an ambulance with lights blazing and sirens blaring, family close behind. He’s twenty-six years old, and diabetic. The paramedics clocked his blood sugar at a mere 10 mg/dL, which is shockingly low. At this hour, it should be more like 100. In the ambulance, they brought his levels back up with glucose, but he did not come around.

Most likely, James overdosed on insulin, which lowers the blood sugar for diabetics who cannot make enough of their own. A level of 10 can kill you.

I look closely at James. His fingertips, toes, and parts of his ears are necrotic, which means the tissue there is dying as a result of long-term, badly managed diabetes. Still, at this point, his vital signs are okay, so I can’t immediately see why he’s out. I call to him loudly, but no response. So I move to what we call noxious stimuli. I rub his sternum with my knuckles.

Boom! James bats my hand away. In other words, he’s probably conscious, but doesn’t want to admit it.

We do a lot of tests on unconscious James: CT scan, EKG, the works. His kidneys are failing from the mismanaged diabetes, but still somewhat functional. No sign of drugs, toxins, or other reasons to be comatose, now that his blood sugar is stabilized.

Out in the waiting room, James’s mother and little brother sit, resigned. They’ve been through this before. Many times before. When I bring them into the room, James opens his eyes and starts swearing and flailing at them, and at me too. I have to have him restrained, though of course, I try to be nice about it.

The distraught mother tells me that James had a fight with his girlfriend today, and may have overdosed on insulin on purpose.

James yells to defend himself. No! My doctor told me to use insulin if I’m going to be emotional! The more insulin I use, the more likely my sugar is going to stay in balance! This, of course, makes no sense. If you’re a type 1 diabetic, you have to use just the right amount of insulin to stay in balance. James, an educated twenty-six-year-old who has had his condition since age seventeen, must know that.

I ask, How have your sugars been in the past?

My sugars are excellent, yells James. My sugars have always been excellent, and my doctor says if my sugar gets low, I have to eat candy bars. I love candy bars.

Yeah, that’s all he eats, says his younger brother. At which point, James starts threatening him with violence.

James is not only in denial about his illness. He’s not only making up his own healthcare decisions in defiance of both his doctors and of common sense. He’s not only committing slow suicide with candy bars. But he’s using his illness as a weapon against his mother, his brother, and tonight, his girlfriend as well.

I wish I could tell you that James is an unusual case.

Harry Returns

Around 2 a.m., Harry arrives. I know Harry well; in fact, I met him my very first week here. He also makes an entrance in a noisy ambulance. Code three, which means close to death.

By now, we know just how to greet Harry: a monitored bed, a respiratory therapist ready, and an intubation tray prepped. An intubation tube goes down into your lungs to take over your breathing, if you can’t breathe well enough by yourself. It’s not a comfortable experience.

Though he nearly died on the way over, Harry had refused an intubation tube from the paramedics. Now they wheel him in sitting up, chest heaving but hardly moving any air. A look of heroic, death-thwarting determination grips his pale face.

Harry’s lungs have filled up with fluid, and he can hardly breathe because he has a chronic condition called congestive heart failure, or CHF. That means his heart is so weak it cannot remove the fluid from his lungs quickly enough, and the fluid builds up. If you manage it carefully, CHF doesn’t kill you. Among other things, that means not eating too much salt, which can retain fluid in the body and damage the heart.

This time, we manage to save Harry’s life without intubating. We give him a medication that removes fluid from his bogged-up lungs. We also give him morphine and nitroglycerine to dilate his blood vessels and take pressure off his heart. And of course, we give him oxygen. After just a few minutes he begins relaxing, his blood oxygen rises, his heart rate drops, and his skin begins to pink up.

As always, when he’s stabilized, Harry and I have a little chat. Just him and me, because nobody from his family comes anymore.

I had a healthy salad and dry, nearly tasteless chicken breast for dinner! he complains. Then just some popcorn while watching TV.

Ah, I say. The salty popcorn was probably more than your body could handle.

He rolls his eyes to indicate that my words just tick him off.

One week later, Harry is back in my ER because of a salty tuna sandwich. We save his life again.

When he arrives again a couple months later, I can’t ask Harry what he ate because he’s comatose. This time I absolutely have to intubate. When he finally awakes, I draw Harry a little picture of his heart with a frowny face: a sad heart trying to deal with waterlogged lungs. I make a list of foods with too much salt—that is, almost all processed foods. I tell him that at this point, he has so weakened his heart that a single cup of popcorn, half a slice of pizza, a can of tuna, even a bowl of cottage cheese or a too-tasty salad might kill him.

He looks at me with annoyance. Then, as he’s intubated and can’t speak, he writes on my pad, If I don’t enjoy my food, I’d rather die. He has that same strange, heroic look in his eyes. The look that says he is bravely thwarting death, and thwarting me, too. I think to myself, At this point, this man hates his own heart.

I’m not in the ER next time Harry arrives. But I hear he does not make it out alive.

I wish I could tell you that Harry is an unusual case.

Apparently Inescapable Patterns

I have a hundred more stories like Harry and James. A thousand. People who push the compassion of doctors, nurses, and family members to the brink. People who have fallen into apparently inescapable and destructive patterns of behavior which harm their relationships as much as their bodies.

In ERs around the country, we have a variety of nicknames for our regulars, some names not so pleasant. I’ll stick with frequent flyers.

Lorraine, the opioid addict, who came to my ER to obtain Demerol for more than twenty years—with the support of her doctor—and finally got thrown out when her roommate pistol-whipped a colleague of mine to obtain more narcotics.

Dylan, who could not leave the girlfriend who beat him up regularly, sent him to the ER with stab wounds, and finally killed him.

Eleanor, the beautiful woman who rewarded her many accomplishments with good food and drink, developed type 2 diabetes, lost her beauty, gained weight, ended up in nonstop health crises, moved from nursing home to nursing home—but never changed her eating habits.

Tony, the nonstop sexaholic, who did manage to find help before all the resulting diseases got him.

Maybe you are a frequent flyer, too.

Maybe you became a frequent flyer because of a physical disability you have been unable to manage.

Or maybe you became a frequent flyer because consciously or subconsciously you were overpowered by one of the cravings all humans feel. A craving for pleasure or for release which became too much for you to handle.

I’ve related some extreme cases, but as I said in the introduction, we all struggle to control our destructive habits, even if they’re just a weakness for too many sweets, too many drinks, or too much TV. Things that maybe harm us just a little, day in and day out. Maybe just enough to keep us from reaching our full potential. Or keep us from being completely happy. Or stop us from living into our golden years.

Sometimes our habits are also destructive to others. That might be because we have a habit of acting out violently, but it might be that our habits simply keep others around us from reaching their full potential. Or being completely happy. Or living into their golden years.

The First Hard Truth

Which brings us to the first hard truth I need to tell you:

Most people with destructive habits do not admit to themselves that they have those habits.

Sure, they know something is wrong. They do, at some level, realize it’s not normal to end up in the emergency room once a month, and usually for the same reason. Maybe they