gigi
November 12, 2015, 4:54pm
21
Well, these are Yankees.
Those are pretty scant facts. Perhaps if they hadn’t intervened, she’d be comatose from a massive brain bleed, or dead, rather than with some weakness amenable to therapy. Maybe they did what they could, but it was too late, as she did complain of feeling like she was having a stroke before she went there. Often, by the time symptoms appear, it’s too late to reverse things, or even keep them from going further.
Not all bad outcomes are preventable. Everybody dies eventually. Medical professionals try to help where we can and often make huge differences. But failure to have a good outcome is NOT automatic evidence of someone making a mistake.
Thanks, that makes sense. She’s 64 so hopefully she will be able to recover with the therapy she’s getting.
This
Qadgop_the_Mercotan:
Those are pretty scant facts. Perhaps if they hadn’t intervened, she’d be comatose from a massive brain bleed, or dead, rather than with some weakness amenable to therapy. Maybe they did what they could, but it was too late, as she did complain of feeling like she was having a stroke before she went there. Often, by the time symptoms appear, it’s too late to reverse things, or even keep them from going further.
Not all bad outcomes are preventable. Everybody dies eventually. Medical professionals try to help where we can and often make huge differences. But failure to have a good outcome is NOT automatic evidence of someone making a mistake.
plus this
USCDiver:
I can think of one scenario that fits all of the information in the OP:
The patient comes in with stroke-like symptoms that have resolved. Gets a typical ED workup including labs, EKG and a CT Head (many patients confuse CT and MRI, but as mentioned above CT will be first test in >99% of cases). Everything comes back normal, they decide to admit her for further evaluation of possible TIA (which would include MRI). She gets seen by a hospital doctor and has admission orders placed (including neuro checks every 2 hours). But there are no beds available in the hospital so she is boarded in the ED for an extended time (20 hours is long but not unheard of for a Monday night-Tuesday morning). The ED is good at a lot of things, but doing inpatient nursing tasks (like scheduled meds and neuro checks) is not one of them.
It’s possible her stoke-like symptoms returned during her ED stay and no one noticed (even the patient) until it was too late to intervene. There is a 3-6 hour window (depending on the institution) where ‘clot-busting’ drugs like tPA can be helpful for acute strokes. If she had onset of symptoms after falling asleep on her stretcher and then no one came around and checked her for a few hours it would be too late at that point.
is consistent with my years as an ER nurse. Something to know about strokes is that not all of them are treatable, and the door closes pretty quickly on those that are. The risks of brain surgery or clot busting drugs outweigh the benefits sooner rather than later.