What injuries can keep someone hospitalized for a month?

Factual Questions
1

I hope some medically knowledgable person will help me out.

Short version of the question: I need a guy to be stuck in a hospital recuperating for a month after a bad beating. No weapons can be involved, just his attacker’s hands and feet. So what injuries – nonpermanent, non-disfiguring (at least not permanently so), and ideally non-life-threatening – can I give him?

Hm, I guess I should explain. Don’t worry, I’m not some violent wacko. Well, not in real life, anyway. I’m rewriting an old serialized story as a sort of retcon, and I need to fix a plot hole that occured as a result of bad planning.

Slightly longer version: This man (he’s about forty, if his age helps) has been badly beaten by a goon to whom he owes money. One thug is holding his arms back, the other is punching him. Originally, I gave our hapless victim fractured ribs, a broken nose, an unspecified wrist injury and a broken leg. The guy was supposed to be hospitalized for less than a week. But he wasn’t released until a month later of story-time. Now I’m rewriting this to fix the timeline and make it marginally more credible, so the injuries need to be more severe to justify the month-long hospitalization. What can we give him?

Long and boring explanation interesting probably to no one but writers, and possibly not even then: What happened was, due to various plot/pacing problems that developed when I stupidly wrote off-the-cuff rather than planning things out properly, the length of time the character spent in the hospital was extended from a few days to a month. Which these days is pretty rare, I’d imagine, and certainly for such relatively minor injuries.

Originally, these discrepencies weren’t so glaring, because the serial’s installments were published at a very slow pace, and I was able to sorta cheat/blur over the chronology of the storyline. The readers probably forgot the original injuries by the time the character finally left the hospital. But now that I’m re-reading the serial archives one after another – which is how new readers will be seeing the story – the timing is glaringly off and it’s bugging the hell out of me. So I want to fix it. It won’t affect the ongoing story arc in future – that’s why I don’t want the injuries permanent – just anyone reading the serial for the first time.

I know I deserve mocking for being so sloppy in the first place! But be gentle, please. :slight_smile:

Mods: I think this is a GQ – the basic question is medical in nature. If, because it’s a fiction thing, this needs to be moved to CS, please go right ahead! And sorry for misjudging.

2

My college professor was in a remote area when the hospital suspected he had a broken back. The X-ray equipment was not working, so he was held in traction(or something like that) for well over a month…several months actually.

3

Unspecified “complications” from surgery? Staph infection? Beaten into a coma?

4

Thanks for the quick responses!

Yowsa, that sucks. No, this hospital isn’t quite that remote or backwater. Though the idea of traction could work, as long as he could be at bout 90% after a month. (He recuperates for about two weeks outside of the hospital.) Hmmm, yes, I think traction could definitely work.

Good efforts! But alas, coma isn’t possible – the guy has too much dialogue in scenes throughout the hospitalization. :slight_smile: I’m not keen on staph; it doesn’t say good things about the quality of care at the hospital, does it? Actually that might not be fair… I suppose any hospital stay could result in staph, maybe? I’ll have to look into it.

Thanks so far.

5

I went through sudden, multiple potentially fatal organ failure recently. I was out in the hospital in a week to switch over to months of outpatient therapy but fully mobile the whole time but the initial plan was to keep me in for a month if things deteriorated. Once you get multiple organ damage like to the liver and pancreas, all bets are off although the person may be conscience most of the time.

6

Cracked ribs or a cracked pelvis (depending on the severity) could keep him on bedrest for that time, but he’d probably be a bit fragile when he got out of hospital for some time afterwards. They tend to keep people in longer if they think the fracture is unstable.

7

Yes, any hospital stay could, potentially, result in staph. It could, for example, be brought in my a careless visitor.

He could be recovering from his injuries and possibly suffer an in-hospital injury.

There could be a complication of surgery where the wound does not close properly, or becomes infected.

A post-injury complication of treatment might work for what you’re aiming at.

8

Yowsa! At the risk of sounding both morbidly curious and indifferent (of which I am neither) what causes something like that? Is it autoimmune? Did you start a thread about it somewhere? (I’ll go look for myself.)

9

Don’t feel bad about the goof. Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall series’ has had more egregious errors. He threw me out of a booksigning for bringing them up during Q&A… Spenser was supposed to have been raised by only males, his mother having died in childbirth. But in other books, he recalls things she said to him, and meals she cooked. More recently, he had an experienced homicide detective, and recurring character looking for the brass ejected from a Smith and Wesson revolver!!

10

On bedrest, but probably not in a hospital, like the OP wants for his story.

Nowadays, it’s common for people with fractures to stay in the hospital only for a few days, until it is stabilized & healing well. Then they are typically released to a nursing home or similar care facility, where they will have nursing care, but not as high a level as at a hospital. It’s mainly a cost-saving measure, nursing home care is less expensive, and keeps hospital beds free for more seriously ill patients.

11

We’re dealing with a thug, right? So once the victim is on the ground, he can start putting the boot in. Broken eye socket, smeared nose, broken jaw and teeth. Cracked ribs, punctured lung, ruptured spleen. Crushed testicle. Damaged kidney. Defense wounds, mainly broken fingers. Even a cracked skull, but I think that will be life threating.

Thing is, say any of the above injuries takes 10 days to fully heal. But if all these were suffered in one go, I read lately that it will take a lot longer for the body to heal, so it could stretch to a month. Perhaps he could have a relapse; sneaks out for a beer and re-meets the thug? Or decides to do a bit of extra physical therapy walking up and down the stairs, trips and falls. Chats up the cutie in the next room, only to be dealt to by her boyfriend.

12

Good brainstorming, everyone!

In thinking about it, the staph infection or other new illness/injury obtained within the hospital stay won’t work quite as well for me, because this means more rewriting of existing scenes, and probably additional scenes as well. If I could just revise the injuries as described at the time of his hospitalization – and thereby imply that these are bad enough to require a lengthy stay – that would be ideal. Basically I don’t want to have to change too much going forward, if at all possible.

Also, for various reasons, I’d rather the injuries be the result of the beating, without this character having anyone else to blame but the goons and his own stupidity/cupidity in gambling and borrowing money. The character should definitely not have cause to sue the hospital or anything like that.

tirial’s cracked ribs idea seems a good bet so far; the already-written chapters do have the character laid up for about two weeks after the hospital stay, and he’s been written as still not 100% even now (which is roughly four weeks post-hospital). Actually the poor schnook was just in a car crash as well. Just not his year, to put it mildly. Thus is the life of an antihero in a serialized melodrama.

So the new question is: could cracked ribs be caused by a one-man beatdown? Is it possible to crack someone’s ribs via punching? Maybe if kicking were involved…

On edit: In other words, what dynamitedave said. :smiley: Vicious minds think alike!

On another edit: Oh crap, t-bonham@scc.net’s new response puts the kibosh on this idea. What about broken ribs, rather than a mere fracture? Still part of a nursing home? Could a hospital have a rehab center that would work?

13

Sorry, I took too long to edit and didn’t get to reply to this:

I totally remember that Spenser continuity glitch, Khampelf! That pesky mom thing. Just because Parker wanted to get all cute and have Spenser “not of woman born,” or “from her womb untimely rip’d” or whatever hifalutin’ literary reference he wanted to make… Still love the series, though. That’s hilarious and awful that he kicked you out of a signing! I had no idea Parker was so anal. Those goofs or retcons are famous and certainly discussed with affection by his fans. Like Nero Wolfe’s U.S. citizenship status, it’s just one of those things where the author changes his/her mind in mid-series.

Fortunately, revising is waaay easier (and more invisible) in online fiction than with print literature!

14

To be fair to Grandmaster Bob, I wasn’t actually removed, but his first response to my question was “Uhhhh… Security!” It got a laugh, and his next answer was “Frankly, I forgot.”

The tale grows in the telling.
Next time, he’ll probably be kicking the crap out of me… :slight_smile:

15

You could try putting your character in a different country. When I had my knee operated on in Japan (to remove a tangerine-size tumor), they kept me there for about three weeks. No unexpected complications, either, that was their standard schedule. I actually got out earlier than expected due to fairly quick healing.

16

Oh gosh, that sounds painful, Sublight. Hope it’s all better now!

Having the hospitalization take place in another country is a very good idea and I sure wish I could use it, considering how inclined U.S. hospitals are to shove people out sooner rather than later, so having this character laid up for weeks in a hospital is problematic if I’m being extremely realistic.

But the character’s attack and hospitalization has to be in the story’s main setting, for numerous reasons – these are local goons, the guy’s scenes in the hospital involved other characters in town and can’t be rewritten so he’s ‘off-screen’ for a whole month, and also because it would mean an awful lot of rewriting to explain why this character – a small-town newspaper owner with money problems – is suddenly in a country with a much better healthcare system. :smiley: As much as I’m trying to fix my story so it makes more sense in retrospect, I gotta accept that this month-long hospital stay is never gonna be especially realistic no matter how I tweak the original setup. My goal is to make it slightly less ridiculous by giving my character injuries that are more severe than those he originally had.

Thanks very much, though! I hope I don’t sound too dismissive of all these helpful ideas … I definitely don’t mean to brush off your suggestions. I hate people who ask for advice and then poo-poo the responses they get. I really do appreciate the time you guys are taking to answer!

So if there are any medically-savvy folks still reading this, what I’m seeking is an injury or combo platter of injuries that:

  • could occur from a beat-down with one strong (but not magically so) young guy punching and/or kicking an otherwise healthy 40something-year-old victim, using no weapons*;

  • would sorta justify at least three - four weeks of hospitalization or in-patient care;

  • would allow the victim to be lucid most of the time in hospital (so I can keep his existing scenes as-is), which means no comas;

  • wouldn’t permanently disable or disfigure the victim in any major way (though other possible lingering after-effects are fine, such as, I dunno, bodily scars, a limp, on-and-off back pain, etc. as I’ve already described him as being not 100% a couple of months after the attack – just nothing major like blindness, amputation, brain injury, etc.);

  • wouldn’t require or imply incompetence or negligence by hospital staffers (in fact, the people treating the victim are also major characters in the serial, and they’re pretty sharp);

  • finally, most important of all, they shouldn’t require too much rewriting of scenes, except perhaps the original beating (though only the beginning of the pummeling is shown, so I don’t have to go into detail) and the victims’ subsequent memories thereof, plus the initial hospitalization where our medical team is describing / treating the injuries.

Hope there’s something awful we can do to this poor shlub that will work for my serial’s purposes. And I’ll be thanking the SDMB and the winner in the site’s credit page, believe me!

  • Does it help if I mention the victim was left for probably a couple of hours to bleed/suffer on his own without medical assistance? He even had to crawl for quite some time before he reached people who helped him and called 911. Anything here we could use to exacerbate his situation?
17

I know that hospitals are very concerned about head injuries, and keep people in ‘for observation’ even when they seem to be doing OK.

Medically, are there such things as comas that come and go?
If so, that might work well for your story. The patient would be kept in the hospital all this time, might be in a coma occasionally, but would have periods of lucidity when he could talk to people, etc. You might even be able to use this in the original scene after he is beaten – it takes him hours to crawl for help, because he occasionally passed out and laid there for a while until becoming conscious again and continuing his trek for assistance.

18

Complications can result in the best of conditions… Broken ribs (or any bones) can puncture organs… patients can cause damage by trying to move a certain way. Not sure, but perhaps police involvement (or other legal red tape) might increase time a bit.

To second the above, head injuries are generally more dangerous than commonly seen in movies - getting a crack on the skull hard enough to knock you out can (potentially) be very serious indeed (rarely would one be able to get up and run about right after awaking).

19

I would recommend a head injury… if he has double vision or seizures for a week, he’s basically lucid but not well enough to go home. Needs observation, like t-bonham suggested.

Alternatively, I’d go with a “slightly” broken back. Have only one or two backbone segments be severely damaged - enough to keep him in traction, but not to cause permanent injury.

IANAD, so you’d need to talk to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about to get the details right.

20

Just to add, it is very possible to crack or break a persons ribs with a punch, let alone a kick while on the ground. However, unless they’re “very” broken ie: in several pieces or damaging/endangering the lungs or other organs, they don’t usually require a lengthy hospital stay. I’ve broken several in my life, and usually just get taped/wrapped/given a elastic brace “girdle” to wear and sent home.
The damage that can be done with empty hands and/or feet can be surprising to those unfamiliar with up-close, personal violence. IMHO, the worst situation to be in is being stomped, not punched or kicked. There’s no way to “roll with the punch” when you’re stuck between the boots and the pavement.
A “good”, “professional” beating can easily land someone in the hospital with broken/fractured bones, punctured lungs, a concussion or skull fracture, bruised kidneys, etc. Once there, a secondary infection is very easy to get (as I contracted one a couple of months ago during a hospital stay) even when receiving quality health care.
On thing to consider, IMO, is if the “beater” is trying to get the victim to pay up, or make an example of him. Is he a loan shark or collections agent for one? TV aside, the (admittedly few) guys I’ve known involved in that line of work tend to be moderately careful when smacking someone around. They’re tying to get paid, mostly, and seldom really give someone a serious beat-down.

I’d suggest that a bunch of “lesser” injuries would be enough to keep your protagonist hospitalized, rather that one “major” injury, given your need to have him mostly functional shortly post-discharge.