Good lord that was a long way to go for that joke.
Sounds like a textbook malpractice suit to me.
I’m guessing “deceased”?
Huh? Where should your doctor give you your diagnosis? Phone it in?
RE the day surgery appendix story: why didn’t that nurse call the surgeon to get you admitted? I work in day surgery and people who planned on going home, but end up staying overnight happens frequently. I’ve never heard of an appy going home the same day, either. Glad you’re better.
With the birth of my oldest son, I was the only delivery for the 3-11 shift. This meant that when the Birthing Unit got busy later that night, I was the “oldest” delivery, so I was booted (in the middle of the night) out to the GYNE portion of the floor (no rooming in because the GYNE part is not a secure access or wasn’t then). My room was right next to a bank of elevators. The hospital did practice proper security measures (for the time)–I had a name band, as did Baby and they were to be checked every time #1 son was brought to me…
I stepped out of the shower the next morning to find my newborn infant in the room with me. No band check, no shout out that they were leaving him with me etc.
This was exactly 2 weeks after a baby had been snatched from Cook County Hospital. I raised hell.
Doctor–patient relationship - Wikipedia Just teasing the OP a bit. I’m lucky to’ve never had such horror stories.
I have two, and both involving my girly bits…
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Family doc was giving me the result of my “abnormal pap smear.” He gave me two options…either have a hysterectomy or I could have a hysterectomy. i was 25 years old and terrified. After seeing a new gyno, I discovered i had dysplasia and after a procedure, i was as healthy as a horse. Never returned to that family doc ever again.
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New gyno (see above) was doing a fertility procedure. I’m on my back with my feet in stirrups. He asks his assistant for a tool or something, she gives it to him, and he sings, “that’s the way uh huh uh huh, I like it, uh huh uh huh.” Dork.
Please tell me the bill came out of that doctor’s pockets and he wasn’t allowed to practice anything more dangerous than slapping bandaids on.
I think I’ve been pretty lucky so far. Only two things really stand out.
The first was when I was in a car accident at age 16. Unfortunately this happened in an area with one of the worst hospitals on the planet. Seriously, this place ought to be condemned. Anyway, I was basically okay after the accident, but I had whiplash and sprained my neck (for the second time in my life. Sigh.)
They wrapped me in a neck brace, strapped me to a flat board, and left me strapped on my back in a deserted hallway for over 20 minutes. The worst part is that I felt really nauseated and kept worrying I was going to throw up and choke to death on my own vomit.
The second was less awful. I had flu symptoms, and this was following a week of rather serious symptoms like bloody stool and such. I was too sick to drive, so my husband took time off work to drive me into the university clinic.
The doctor there was an utter bitch. She asked me what was wrong with me, and when I started to tell her about the blood in my stool, she snapped, ‘‘I’m not asking you about your symptoms last week. I’m asking you about your symptoms right now.’’ Then she bitched me out for coming in with ‘‘cold symptoms’’ and told me I wasn’t really that sick and shouldn’t be wasting her time.
By the time I got home, I had a fever of 103 and became violently ill for the next several days. It is the first and only time I have filed a complaint against a medical professional.
Teasing OP about a typo.
It is cause for malpractice but my neighbor would never sue anyone. He is just a sweetheart and took it all in stride. I hope he didn’t have to pay for this procedure on top of the week in the hospital!
When I was 24, I noticed an odd “spot” in my left eye, like a grayed-out area in my central vision. Checked my contact lens, and there was no debris or protein deposit or anything odd on it. Huh, weird. No pain or anything, but I knew it wasn’t right, so I called up my ophthalmologist, and they said to come right in. I did, she dilated my eyes, had a good look-see, and very gravely said I was going to go into downtown Seattle and see a retina specialist immediately.
Oh. All righty, then. I called my Mom who came and picked me up and we schlepped into Seattle. More tests. Dilation, a SUPER-fun dye test (injecting yellow dye into a vein in my hand, then taking blinding flash photos as the dye travels through the veins in my retina), and some others, including the typical eye chart series.
After the whole schmear, the doc just sort of scoots his chair back and hunches over, puts his elbows on his knees. He drops his face into his hands, and sort of scrubs his hands up and down. He says NOTHING for looooooong minutes, just sighs a few times and continues to look at the floor or rub his eyes.
Finally, my Mom says, “WELL? Aren’t you going to SAY anything? What’s wrong with her eyes?? You’re scaring us!”
Without going into detail, my diagnosis was not positive in the least. He had no idea what was causing the problem (macular degeneration caused by burst blood vessels, resulting in blind spots), no idea how to stop the advance of the scarring, no idea how to prevent further damage, and ZERO idea of any sort of ongoing prognosis. Nada. Zip. Didn’t even have any sort of actual name for what was happening (that would come more than two years later, after seeing EVERY damn specialist on the west coast).
So, uh, you know, I started crying. 'Cause I’m all weird and stuff. And the fucker had the gall to act all puzzled and pissed off. “Why are you getting so upset?”
Seriously. He actually SAID that. My Mom tore him a new asshole about his shitty bedside manner and utter lack of compassion. People in the waiting room heard every word. I love my Mom.
At future visits, I refused to deal with that guy, would only deal with his partner.
My father was given his diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer while in his hospital bed by a very obviously busy doctor, who was surrounded by about eight medical students. It went something like, “It’s too big to operate on so we’ll get you started on chemotherapy in a couple of days. Do you have any questions?” He waited about two seconds while by father lay there in stunned incomprehension, then out the room he went, trailed by his gaggle.
I went for years with a torn ACL because doctors wouldn’t give me a referral to an orthopedic surgeon. One doc, after reviewing my file, said if I would just lose weight I wouldn’t keep spraining my knee.
This is the same doc who was surprised when, at 24, I was pregnant as my records showed I had a hysterectomy at age 42.
I had some imaging done for a cyst on an ovary. Through the imaging, the discovered that I had polycystic kidney disease. According to my doctor (at that time), I should know all about it since it’s 100% inherited, 1 in 7 die on aneurysms, blah blah. I was sitting in front of her, file open between us, she’s flipping through the right hand side. On the left hand side the top page, my cover sheet with family history noted in HUGE red letters “AM ADOPTED, DO NOT KNOW FAMILY HISTORY” is showing.
:smack: That’s what I get for reading these late at night. Sorry to ruin your joke, Auto.…
I thought of another one–a true bedside manner one, not just poor health care.
Daughter was about 9 and chubby. Now, she has a great aunt who is morbidly obese and TH tends to be heavier than he should, and I need to lose 10 pounds (I’d like to lose 20, but let’s be realistic). But “genetics” aside, Daughter prided herself on her capacity to eat. She has always eaten healthy choices (doesn’t like fast food), just way too much of it. So, we’re in for a check up of some kind. I mention to the pediatrician (not the partner we usually go to), that D’s intake seems excessive.
Ped looks daughter over, checks ht and wt graph (which does show her as heavy for her height) and says these immortal words: “If you eat more calories than you burn off, you gain weight.”
After such pearls of wisdom, Daughter ran home and never ate seconds of anything again. As if. :rolleyes:
*actually, in middle school she became a vegetarian. In fifth grade, she became interested in soccer and went on to play competitively, captain the field hockey team and now will run her first marathon this year. She is fit, trim and healthy as can be. But not because Dr Ped gave her such salient advice back in the day.
Got another peds story–this time a pediatric resident.
#1 son was 4. He really loved preschool and was afraid of going on the big yellow bus to Kindergarten. At his K check up, I told the resident that son had told me he didn’t want to be 5. Not in casual passing, but seriously, dreaded his 5th Bday, did not want a party etc. Resident looks at me, looks at #1 son.
Resident gets down on his haunches to be eye to eye with #1 son. I’m thinking “hey, maybe this guy can help…” When he says to this 4 year old boy: “So… Why don’t you want to be 5?”
Yeah. Cleared that right up. :rolleyes:
And then there was the old time pediatrician, when Daughter was an infant and had explosive diarrhea from the antibiotics she was. She subsequently got an extreme diaper rash, so raw it bled. Doc tells me, with a wave of his hand, “just leave the diaper off.” Okey-dokey. What I did was after every BM, I held her over the tub and sluiced her clean using the handheld showerhead. Worked like a charm (that and a ton of Desitin). So much for Marcus Welby.
Sorry; it’s my Belgian accent. It was indeed “diseased.”
You, of course, wrote it phonetically correct; I just thought it made more sense that someone who had passed out might be thought to have “deceased” than be “diseased.”
I don’t see why this isn’t the best possible question to lead with. What am I missing?
Working in ophthalmology, I’m intrigued but understanding if you don’t want to go into it.
I’ll say that the doctors I work with really only forget simple stuff like warning people that the drops will sting, or that one is tinted yellow (I saw one patient wipe her eye with a tissue and recoil in shock at the jaundice-looking stain left on it, and rushed to assure her that it was just a short-term dye), that kind of thing. They deal with it every day, and after a while their regular patients do too, so sometimes they forget for new/infrequent patients. I haven’t heard any stupidity when it comes to giving a diagnosis, especially the really rough ones.
Larry, I agree, I thought that was a pretty good question from the context I got from the incident. My assumption would be that the kid just said he didn’t want to be 5, and nothing else, and so maybe hearing the question from a medical-type would elicit a better explanation.
Agreed.