Who Cares?

When Mr X was diagnosed with heart failure, he felt depressed. He knew something was wrong because he was always so tired and short of breath when he did the usual things around the house. But he thought only elderly people would get this disease and he was only 57! Since the diagnosis, he feels rather useless because he also had to stop working. He even had to get rid of his pigeons because he could not feed them anymore; lifting the two-liter water can in the pigeon house made him deadly tired. But since he visited the heart-failure policlinic regularly, he felt better. The nurse showed him how to take his medicines, control his weight, and keep his diet, which helped him a lot. But last week the nurse told him that he could not visit the policlinic any longer because there were too many patients on the waiting list. Because he is doing better now, she referred him to a so-called telemedical centre. The heart-failure nurse explained that he should use a wireless scale and blood-pressure meter daily. He thought it was a kind of magic because these instruments would send his measurements automatically to the telemedical centre, where a telenurse would control them.