My twins are 24 now, but when I was expecting them, I developed a pregnancy-related heart condition that made doctors quiver. Not because my condition was so grave, but because treating a pregnant woman with tachycardia, well, no thanks. They just couldn’t accept that level of legal liability, several highly regarded Washington, D.C., physicians told me.
My first obstetrician, a specialist in multiple births, said I should have an abortion and “start over.” We’re never seeing that guy again, I told my husband, and we did not.
But it wasn’t just him. The first two cardiologists I consulted said essentially the same thing: Sorry, but I can’t treat your heart condition while you’re pregnant. Their advice, too, was to abort, though neither my life nor those of either of my children was in any immediate danger.
This is how I lost my reverence for that “decision between a woman and her doctor,” which in my case was being recommended solely for the comfort and convenience of the physicians themselves. But this isn’t a column about abortion.
The second cardiologist I saw said he had a friend — kind of a cowboy, he implied — who might be willing to treat me if I insisted on staying pregnant.
Enter Ramin Oskoui, a then-young cardiologist who did not hesitate to take me on. I did have to stay on bedrest for the next almost seven months, because without the medication that it wasn’t really safe for me to take while pregnant, whenever I stood up for more than a few minutes, my heart raced so fast that I’d start to lose consciousness.
My husband, a journalist who was covering the Clinton White House at the time, brought me every meal in bed, and played Scrabble with me nearly every night. But the other heroic figure in my life was Dr. Oskoui, who made regular unrushed house calls.
He took excellent care of me, and treated me like a person, too. Though I did not feel great, it was a hopeful more than a scary time in my life: Literally all I had to do was read — lots of Dostoyevsky, for whatever reason — talk on the phone and be waited on. Does that sound so hard?
My unconventional doctor did make the occasional unconventional remark: He kept mentioning the height of my not-very-tall female obstetrician, for instance, though I never knew why this was so fascinating.
Minutes before my emergency C-section, he told me that the medical team had talked it over and elected to get the babies out as quickly as possible, though this would leave a larger and uglier scar, “because we decided you’re not the bikini type.” (Dear Doc, love ya, but hope you have never said this again.)
You know, though, he was there in the delivery room, just in case something went wrong, and while it seemed clear that the obstetrician was not delighted to have him, I was.
If we ever talked about politics, I don’t remember it.
As I’m not a regular viewer of Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox, I did not know that Dr. Oskoui, a say-anything cable natural, had gone on to become something of a regular on it, introduced as “one of the premier cardiologists, frankly, in the world.” He had also gone on to become chief of staff at Sibley Memorial Hospital in D.C., where my kids were born, and was named “physician of the year” there five years ago, before Sibley was subsumed into the Johns Hopkins system.
On Ingraham’s show, he spoke out against the Affordable Care Act and explained why “Medicare for All” would never work. Last month, he criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which really did foul up testing for COVID-19, for “how they’ve acted on gun control. They’re a highly political organization.” And recently, he was on “The Ingraham Angle” alongside former Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer, touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus game-changer.
Even when I started hearing about how Ingraham and a couple of her doctor friends had convinced President Donald Trump that a drug that’s been prescribed for years for lupus and malaria might treat or even prevent the novel coronavirus, I only later realized that the doctor who’d been such a cowboy that he’d been willing to treat a pregnant woman with a heart condition was now such a cowboy that he was willing to talk up an unproven application to a highly suggestible president.
On TV, Ingraham asked Dr. Oskoui if health care workers, the military and pretty much everyone else should be on hydroxychloroquine at this point, prophylactically. “Should they all be on hydroxychloroquine with a physician’s supervision?”
“I think the answer is clear, absolutely yes,” he answered. Lupus patients on the drug, which he called “both safe and highly effective,” simply aren’t getting COVID-19, he said. Trump has repeated Oskoui’s assertion that lupus patients on hydroxychloroquine aren’t getting sick.
But fact-checkers have found that just isn’t true, and other experts have dismissed the idea that this is a COVID-19 miracle drug as quackery. Reports of its “Lazarus effect” on those infected with the coronavirus are “complete and utter nonsense,” according to former Harvard Medical School researcher William Heseltine. He is convinced that just as in the handful of small studies done so far, clinical trials now underway will show that “this drug will have a very mild effect on charging the course of the disease, if it has any effect at all.”
Hydroxychloroquine is usually safe, it’s true, yet can cause serious cardiac side effects, including potentially fatal arrhythmias.
So when the president says, “What do you have to lose?” the answer is, everything.
“Take it. I really think they should take it,” Trump said recently. “But it’s their choice. And it’s their doctor’s choice or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you’d like.”
Naturally, I wish both the president and my old friend had spoken more carefully about the drug. And I wish doctors weren’t prescribing it so liberally, as this pandemic has gotten away from us, that those who’ve been taking it for lupus for years are suddenly having trouble getting it.
It’s never bad to be reminded that the protagonists in our personal stories come from all backgrounds and ideologies. The virus is our enemy, not the neighbor with whom we disagree. If we can’t remember that even now, our post-plague world will be far too much like this one.
But we shouldn’t confuse hype and hope, either. And it’s also good to be reminded that cowboys of all kinds, indispensable as they are to our past, future and go-get-’em sense of ourselves, can be wrong, too.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Melinda Henneberger is a columnist and member of the Kansas City Star’s editorial board.
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