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Aswad -> RE: ER Triage Nurse MURDERS PATIENT through neglect... (6/3/2007 6:48:55 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Real0ne
From my personal experiences with doctors, rule number one you NEVER tell them what is wrong with you. You give them symptoms that lead them to the exact conclusion and play ignorant.
Indeed. My nephandi's mother was to be promoted to head nurse when she quit her job.
She's got this bronchitis, or somesuch, that keeps coming back. And every time, she has to describe the symptoms, and he'll conclude it's back, and write the scrip or whatever. But if she should so much as mention suspecting that it's back, even if she describes the same symptoms, he'll do all sorts of physical exams, then blood works, bacterioculture, and so forth, before finally, a week later when the results are in, make the same assessment.
A friend of mine is the son of a dentist who specializes in infections and such.
So, when he comes in, with his dad, he tells the doc (correctly) that it's a such-and-such infection, which is usually discovered first by the dentists (which is actually the case). The doc puts him through his paces, of course, for months. I could just see him fade day by day. At the end, he was sleeping 14-16 hours per day, and his hemoglobin count was down to the point where, even with iron tabs, his blood could just barely carry the oxygen. He was whiter than bleached paper. Literally.
Anyway, I said the end, so I'll explain. One day, he gets severe stomach pains, to the point where he starts vomiting from the pain, not from the nausea. So he goes to the regular ER. Has to wait an hour or two to see the doc. When he gets called in, he's busy vomiting up blood in the toilet, so the triage nurse cusses and gives him a stern reprimande for not being around when called (wtf?). Then he gets to see the doc, who says "I'm not sure about this. Can't you go see your physician tomorrow?"...
At this point, his dad has had enough, so he picks him up (not that hard at this point), and carries him out into the car and drives to the main ER. Upon arrival, one of the docs there walk over and feels a couple of places on his stomach straight away, without having been told what was wrong, and immediately starts yelling for people to get emergency operating room #2 (the one closest to the entrance, reserved for severe gunshot wounds, etc.) ready, and running for a carriage. Everyone starts scrambling. Three days later, he wakes up on a morphine drip, and the orderlies tell him that he'll be fine.
Turns out they had to remove 40cm small intestine and 30cm large intestine, due to a rupture because of the pressure of pus from the inflammation, and he now has to go in for a USD 35.000 shot a few times a year, plus take a (literal) handful of pills every day. It used to be more, but now he doesn't need the immunosuppressants anymore.
Funny thing is, getting his charts, he couldn't find the blood work. So he asked for it, not explaining it was his own (he's a med student, so he has access to these things). The nurses find it in the lab archive, with a note attached saying something along the lines of "not returned - patient dead by now, see infection counts". Turns out he was going into septic shock as they were putting him on the table, the infection was that bad.
My own experience was with a hypertensive crisis.
I took an instant-release dose of blood pressure lowering medication, and went to the ER straight afterwards (the ER was 20-30 minutes away, I didn't want to risk waiting that long). So they tell me to wait. And I wait. For 2 hours. Anyway ... the doc takes me in, and checks my BP. "Sure, it's damn high, but high enough to cause organ failure right now. Go see your doc tomorrow." So, I try to explain that the reason it's gone down is that I took the meds, and that it would be at peak concentration about then, but these things require further monitoring and treatment. No way. So, I explain what meds I'm on and how they cause it, and ask if he's familiar with them. No, he's not. So, I ask if he wants to read the package insert. No, he doesn't. Not even the part labeled "For ER personell in case of hypertension"? Nope, definitely not. So, I'm sent home, and sure enough, a couple of hours later, I have to take another dose of the med, which isn't supposed to be used outside a hospital. And keep doing that for about 12 hours to keep it down to a "damn high" level. Next day, I get an arrythmia, which subsided on its own. So I tell this stuff to the guy treating me, and he's all WTF too, and the ER doc in question got a reprimand from the doctor's association.
Could share all sorts of other such "funny" stories, but the bottom line is, an unknown number of people die due to doctors' arrogance every year, particularly first-line docs, and due to improper triage.
Never tell the doc what to think, or he'll get territorial about it, and let you die, if necessary, to prove his point. Not all docs are like that, of course. But in my experience, and that of many others I know, about half of them are. And that's beyond "acceptable risk" to me.
Don't know the exact figures, but malpractice is the fourth to fifth leading cause of death in some places.
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