I would like to say, for the record, that most medical professionals are indeed professional. During my mother's previous stay in the hospital for her hernia surgery on Thanksgiving Day the staff was excellent and they took very good care of her.
This was not the previous stay.
First, they had to put her in an overflow room. Then the attending physician seemed to be undecided and uncertain as to what needed to be done. The nursing staff paid scant attention to her, treating her as if she were just an old lady that was constipated, and when they moved her from the overflow room to a regular room they went from scant attention to downright neglectful.
To the point where they removed the oxygen monitors on a patient who was receiving oxygen and having problems breathing. Or more to the point, they took them off to move her and then never put them back on.
When we left the hospital that evening there was some concern. There had been a lot of talk and conjecture, but no action. The core problem was she was constipated, which was causing everything to back up to her stomach, which was slowly filling with fecal matter.
They were feeding her laxatives and performing enemas (or attempting to anyway) and getting next to no results. There was talk of inserting tubes to pump her stomach out, but that was never done. We told them to call us if anything changed and then we went to Favorite Niece's house for the evening.
The next morning my brother (who is also a nurse) called from Iowa raising hell because Mom was in the Critical Care unit and why hadn't anyone told him??? He had called her room to see how she was doing only to find out she had been moved.
We went to the hospital to find out that the night nurse had noticed Mom's O2 levels dropping to the point her hands and feet were blue. She had been agitating to get her to the CC unit all night, but no one listened to her until 7:30 that morning.
They moved her, set her up with monitoring and inserted the tube that had been discussed but never implemented the day before. Then they drew 1300 CC's of fecal matter out of her stomach, on top of the 600 CCs or so that she had already vomited up. Her breathing issues were due to the fact that her backed up bowels and distended stomach were pressing against her diaphragm.
At no time were we contacted.
My sisters (both nurses) immediately leapt into action. One went for the Patient's Advocate office while the other went to the Director of Nurses office. Within the hour exploratory surgery was planned to see if they could figure out what was going on.
What they found was a tumor causing a blockage to the lower colon, and a tear in the colon which had caused massive infection in the abdomen, neither of which would have been caught during the previous surgery for the hernia, nor were they new conditions.
The happy news is the tumor was completely removed, the infection was cleared up, and the colon was cleared. She had a colonoscopy that can be reversed in 6 months, meaning she will have to deal with a bag for a while till everything heals up but then she will be back to whatever passes for normal for her.
As to the tumor, it is at the pathologists to determine if it deserves further attention, but either way it has been completely removed so it shouldn't be an issue in and of itself, so that's good. We will know something within the week.
I must also say that seeing my sisters systematically dismantle the patient's advocates attempts at explaining away the medical malfeasance (there were two of them, and I got the impression they were used to dealing with non-medical people that they could baffle with bullshit) was truly a thing of beauty.
There was no yelling or screaming, just a calm rational discussion of protocols and standard medical practices for patients presenting certain symptoms. One of the advocates, herself a nurse as I understand it, tried to say that the standard practices depended on the symptoms, at which point my younger sister (who is the Director of Nurses at her job) went over the symptoms that Mom had been admitted for and then cited chapter and verse what the standard medical practice was for those symptoms.
I don't know if anything will be done, but I do know that they know that we know...things that we know. Or something.
At any rate, Mom will be in the hospital for a while as they administer doses of antibiotics for the infection and to head off any other issues. Five to seven days, said the surgeon, and then they can go home back to Iowa.
This will surely be a Thanksgiving vacation that the folks won't ever forget.
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