Christmas eve morning 2001, we took my mama to the doctor. Yep, pneumonia. 10 days of breathing treatments, iv antibiotics, they decided she was ready to come home but wanted to keep her one more day and give her some iv steriods. Getting ready to go home, she called the nurse to the room about gross hives all over her torso. The idiot nurse literally screamed at her "what have you done????" What had she done? Laid in a hospital bed consuming nothing but what they had given her for 11 days!!!!! To this day, they've never voiced the opinion that she had an adverse reaction to the steroids.
6 weeks later, I had to call an ambulance, I wasn't sure she wasn't having a heart attack. In the hour that it took the ambulance to get to the house, even in the shape she was in, she could have walked to the hospital. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance filled up with smoke and had to pull to the side of the road and take her out. I'd had to stay here and make phone calls; I beat her to the hospital. Literally all night was spent in the ER. They diagnosed her with a "grossly enlarged gallbladder," no obvious stones, but it needed to come out. Saturday morning they put her in a room, the dr scheduled an atomic stress test for Sunday and surgery for Monday, emergency surgery. Sunday a.m. a nurse asked mama why she wasn't eating breakfast. Mama told her she had the test. Nurse told her they don't do them on Sunday and hand-delivered her breakfast tray. My mama would NEVER miss a meal unless she had to, so she ate it. Shortly after finishing, they came from the atomic lab to pick her up. She's laying on her stretcher in the lab and mentions that they had fed her. Technitions went balistic; she could die testing on a full stomach, she was suppose to fast and what did she mean by eating??? Her emergency surgery wound up being performed on Thursday, less then 24 hours shy of a week after I called the ambulance.
Morale of this story: if you're going to the hospital, be prepared to take care of yourself? Ain't nobody there reading the charts!!!!!
That horrid hospital was one of the teaching hospitals in SC!!!! That's SCARY!!!!
I have another one too:
My grandson was 5 days old when his dad called to tell me my daughter had been crying for hours with a headache. She's not a complainer, so I suggested that he take her to the ob that delivered the baby. They saw her, gave her a perscription and sent her home ... NOW ... e v e r y t i m e I've ever been to a dr's office, the first thing they do is weigh me, they didn't weigh her ... 2nd thing they do is take your bloodpressure, again they failed this common medical precedure.
New Dad got them back to the house with the perscription, fixed the baby's bottle and she couldn't determine the distance to take the bottle out of his hand. He got her in bed, handed her the baby and the bottle. When done, he took the baby to burb him and baby threw up on his shirt, as he went to change his shirt he thought I'll get her a blanket, she must have a fever, she seemed to be shivering. When he got back with the blanket, he found her in a grandmaul seizure and called me. I told him to get an ambulance and made arrangements to drop my new grandson off with my mama while I went to be with my child.
We were all at the hospital by 11am. She had seizures on and off all day. When they finally subsided, they let me stay with her in trauma room. They did a CATscan. Drs from the ob office were all over the place. At 5 pm a neurosurgeon and 2 residents that were being mentored by him were there and he was explaining the test they were going to do tomorrow. I stopped him and asked what they were going to do about her bloodpressure in the mean time. He questioned this and I pointed at her automatic machine her bloodpressure was incredibly high for a 21 yr old!!!! I told him it went up on top or bottom every time it read. He got a cuff and took her manually. He told his residents to always listen to family and told me that I had very well saved my child's life that afternoon. She had e-clampsia, a could be fatal case of it. My child had laid not in ER but in trauma ALL DAMED DAY and nobody but her highschool educated mama knew that her bloodpressure was steadily climbing??????
BTW, a one oz drip of magnesium sulfate, epsom salts!!!!! and she went home the next morning and has been fine since.