Our Parents in Crisis by Ann G. Sjoerdsma

On the evening of Friday, June 7, 2002, 78-year-old Fern Sjoerdsma lay in a Chesapeake, Va., hospital bed, moaning and breathing rapidly and laboriously. Her daughter was shocked at this sudden, unexpected turn in her mother’s condition. Her mind raced: “What should I do?” What author Ann G. Sjoerdsma did was endure an “interminable night,” as she sought to convince the “placid, polite, yet intractable” hospital physician attending to her mother that his perceptions were faulty, and he had to take action. She could see how the diagnosis didn’t fit her mother’s symptoms, even though doctors couldn’t—or wouldn’t. The misdiagnosis of her mother’s life-threatening illness galvanized Sjoerdsma, an experienced researcher, journalist, and lawyer. Simply because of aging—because of surviving—her mother and father, who were highly educated and intelligent physicians, had become vulnerable. If they needed protection from healthcare errors, Ann realized, she had to protect them. She had to speak up. The experience astounded her and changed her life. Sjoerdsma became a dedicated bedside advocate, representing her parents’ interests in all healthcare venues, and doing extensive research about medicine, diseases prevalent in older age, anatomy, physiology, and the facts of normal aging, which she shares in Our Parents in Crisis. As Sjoerdsma confronted more health crises—a pulmonary embolus; falls leading to hip and leg fractures; heart disease—she witnessed firsthand how fragmented, error-prone, and patient-unfriendly the U.S. healthcare system is and how often doctors engage in ageism and what she calls “No-Think.” Our Parents in Crisis is a call to action to protect elders from biases and other risks in U.S. healthcare. It is also a poignant family story.