Nancy Kuhlman arrived in Colorado on Monday feeling lousy. She knew the trip from New Delhi would be the hardest part. Still, it was worse than she expected. She hadn’t anticipated the impact altitude would have on her recovery from open-heart surgery.
She admits she’s exhausted.
It was rough for her husband too.
Steve slept in her hospital room on a sofa for a month and sometimes had trouble understanding the nurses. He got tired of eating chicken, fish and vegetables. The one day when the nutritionist wasn’t looking, and he scored some deep-fried food, it was heaven.
They were glad to be home in Colorado.
So given all this – the 17 hours flying each way in coach, the month in a foreign country, the cultural differences, the dislocation – would they recommend traveling to India for heart surgery?
“I wouldn’t go anyplace else,” Nancy said. “Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”
Nancy was diagnosed with a bad mitral valve as a child and, as a result, has been unable to get health insurance. At 58, she could postpone surgery no longer.
Estimated costs for hospital care for the procedure here – not including doctors’ fees or lab tests – came to $150,000. The Pagosa Springs restaurateurs knew they would be paying that bill for years, but they believed they had no choice.
Then Nancy saw a report on Americans traveling to India for heart surgery and began investigating. With the help of Tom Hiland, who had surgery in India in 2005 and returned to Lakewood to start India America Global Solutions, she decided to outsource her health care.
Nancy clearly was dazzled by the sales pitch for Escorts Heart Institute and Research Center before she left. The videos made it look clean and modern. The staff seemed unbelievable.
On Feb. 18, after a quick visit to the Taj Mahal, Nancy was admitted and immediately realized she was wrong about the place. “I was much more impressed with the hospital, the people, the doctors and the staff than I expected,” she said.
“I was blown away by it.”
She had been told to expect that she would be in the hospital for longer than a typical stay at a U.S. facility – two weeks compared with about four days here.
She ended up being there four weeks.
“I coughed myself silly” trying to expectorate the fluid that accumulates in the lungs after surgery, “but I couldn’t find the muscles,” she said. “They had to do lung-tapping twice.
“It frightens me to think that here I would have been released from the hospital after four days.”
U.S. doctors likely would have monitored her recovery closely. Her outcome here likely would have been good. Nancy knows that. But she can’t imagine receiving the same level of care in the U.S. “We don’t have anything like it in America.”
While in intensive care, she had a personal nurse 24 hours a day. “I was never left alone,” she said. The doctors and nurses “were so thorough and they paid so much attention to what I said. They spent so much time with me and were so caring and kind, it was like I was the only patient they had.
“I’ve never had that much personal attention.”
When Nancy was released, Steve said, the nurses all came to say goodbye. “There were tears all around,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The price was higher than expected.
When Nancy entered Escorts, the full cost of her surgery, tests, doctors, hospital care and accommodations for Steve for two weeks was expected to be $13,350.
The extra two weeks in the cardiac care unit ballooned the price.
It was almost $16,000.
People don’t go there just to save money though.
While they were in the hospital, the Kuhlmans met a man from Kentucky who was accompanying his father, a heart-surgery patient. The patient could afford to go just about anywhere for the procedure. His son is a highly paid professional here in the U.S., after all.
He’s a cardiologist.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
