What’s the scariest or most irritating/ annoying/ horrific thing that happened to you as a patient in a hospital?
I work in a professional capacity in a hospital, and am young enough (or lucky enough) to have never been a patient (knock wood). I’m looking for an insight into the patient experience.
Been in lots of hospitals, and mostly the experience hasn’t been too awful;no major disasters or horror stories.
I have the usual list of hospital annoyances (like insensitive staff who say things like “Did we get your urine sample?” to the room at large. When one has visitors, usually.)
But here’s the biggest gripe I have about hospital staff: Many have a habit of acting like patients are arguing when they’re not.
When you tell a patient, “The doctor wants you out of bed today,” and the patient says “Fine,” there’s no need to start in with “No, he really wants you up. You can just go up and down the hall.” I’m not arguing for pete’s sake! A surprising number of medical people habitually gear up for opposition, then don’t know how to turn it off when you don’t oppose them. After a day or two, this gets really old.
Catrandom
Three things spring to mind right away:
If your job requires you to be able to draw blood, you damn well better be able to do it, and do it well. You get ONE try with me. And if I tell you No, I mean No. I have the right to refuse to have you do anything to me, and if I choose to exercise that right you better respect it. That means if you missed the vein the first time and have left me in pain, and I tell you “No,” you DO NOT try again.
Respect my privacy. Do not allow strangers to wander into my room, even if you are getting a cut from whatever they are selling. When I had one of the kids, photographers, etc., were constantly stopping by my room to see if I wanted to have them take “the first baby pictures.” (I was hospitalized for five days – c-sections.) One day in particular I was standing naked in the bathroom with a nurse helping me wash up some – it was the first day without the IV, and the first time I had been out of bed. It was “no visitors” time. The door to my (private) room was closed, but the bathroom door was open. Some a**hole of a male photographer knocks on the bedroom door and opens it and walks in without being given permission to do so. There I stood, naked, with blood dripping down my legs, and the nurse trying to help me wash. I STILL resent this.
I am *I." Not “we.”
I did a little medical malpractice defense in my early years as a lawyer. Let me give you one piece of advice: lousy communicators get more lawsuits filed against them than good communicators do, even if they are at the same skill level. A good communicator sometimes will not be sued even if he/she probably ought to be. Don’t duck your patient’s questions, and don’t bullshit 'em.
-Melin
Oddly enough, after two months of lurking and saying exactly squat, I have a response to two questions today. My girlfriend went into the hospital today for surgery to fix a congenital defect (I always knew she was defective…). Anyways, she was having a rib removed. They screwed up, and punctured her thoracic cavity (the tiny pocket between your lungs and your ribs that needs to be less than the ambient air pressure so that you can breathe). This sucks, to put it bluntly. They (the surgeons) decided to wait until she was in recovery, and then see what her condition was. They decided she needed a chest tube. They gave her a local, but it hurt like hell. She cried, and is still in major pain and can’t move much. The point of all this was, I was pretty damn scared when I found out how close she was to dying. To answer your question, that’s the scariest surgical moment I’ve ever faced.
derfel
Waiting God knows how long (I’ve been told a half hour, but it felt like an eternity) to see a doctor when I was having chest pains so extreme I could barely breathe. (I’m not faulting the doctors, mind. I’m sure if it looked like I was really in danger, they’d have rushed to me.)
Then, once they finally had a chance to get to me, they had to hold me down to get an IV into me. (I’m not good with that stuff…)
Ended up staying for a week - with no return of the pains, and they never did figure out what had happened. I was rather relieved, however, that they were able to eliminate several possible causes, including heart attack, and gall stones.
Thing is, the pain was so great that I didn’t really have time to be afraid until after, when I was feeling better and my head was clear enough to worry about what might have caused it.
I think mine was actually at a clinic, not hospital. I was 4 or 5 years old, and they had to take blood for something. I was in the lab, and they sat me in the chair. The nurses there were very insensitive, and they just want to get patients in and out as fast as they can. As soon as I saw the needle, I started to squirm a little. Another nurse roughly grabbed my shoulders and tried to pin me down.
I panicked. I threw an all out, screaming, crying, kicking, biting, hysterical fit. It took about 6 nurses to hold me still enough to draw the blood.
I’ve been terrified of needles ever since then.
There was another particulary bad blood test, too. I was lucky and got a nice, sensitive nurse. She let me lay down, and talked in a nice soothing voice. But she was using a needle that was a little too big, and the vein kinda bounced out of the way… gulp…so she had to try again…
faint
Hmmm… Well when I had my appendix out while living with my dad in Florida when I was 13, the nurses didn’t believe me when I told them there were ants in my bed. I would try to show them the dead ant bodies after I’d squish them (they were biting the shit out of me) but they would tell me it was my imagination. Finally when I was able to get out of bed, I found the crack in the wall where they were coming in and showed it to my dad, who told the nurses… I don’t know if they ever did look into it though.
When I was delivering my son, they didn’t close the freaking door to the room. So there I was, crotch to the world, for over an hour and a half (during pushing) with everyone who passed by in the hall getting a front-row view. Oh, and various un-related hospital staff kept wandering in to watch. What the hell??
The worst hospital story I have is from a state hospital… My mom talked my husband into committing me to the mental ward when I was 5 months pregnant. I’d gone off my medication and kinda flipped out. What I needed, of course, was my medication. Then I would have calmed right down. After sitting around the ER for about 45 minutes without anything happening (and we were the ONLY ONES THERE) I said “this is bullshit” and started to leave. My husband came up and tried to pull me back in by grabbing my arm.
Some security guards saw this and came over to help him. The started to wrestle me inside like I was some sort of felon and they were the big bad cops. After fighting for what seemed like forever (I think I bit one of them) they finally wrestled me TO THE FLOOR, ON MY STOMACH and held me down. Then they brought out a gurney and lifted me onto it. They picked me up by my hands and feet, BELLY DOWN and lifted me up. Now, one of the worst parts about pregnancy is that all of your muscles are stretching. It is painful enough just to try to stand up out of a chair (flexing the stretched muscles hurts) let alone have the whole weight of your body pushing your belly out!
Once they got me onto the gurney, they strapped me into four-point restraints. If you’ve never been restrained, here is the deal: your ankles are cuffed down to the corners of the bed, your right arm is cuffed to the top of the bed, over your head, and your left arm is cuffed to the side of the bed, by your hip. The cuffs are wide strips of leather with buckles. Keep in mind that one of the most uncomfortable positions a pregnant woman can lie in is on her back…
So they wheeled me into a room and pulled the curtains around me and they left me there. For about 3 hours. Without anyone so much as peeking in. I managed to unbuckle and get out of my restraints, and was sitting on the bed by the end of the time. A doctor came in and asked me about 3 questions (my name, etc) and left again, and then some guy came in, no idea who he was, could have been a janitor for all I could tell, and he has a hospital gown in his hand. I said I wouldnt’ put it in because I wasn’t staying, and so he started coming for me, to take my clothes off!
I jumped down off the bed on the far side from him and the scene that followed was straight out of any sitcom you can think of: him chasing me around the bed, etc. Finally another security guard came in to help and between them they wrestled me down onto the bed and put the restraints back on. I managed to spit on one of them in the process.
They put the cuffs on much tighter this time, and almost right away my hands fell asleep. In addition, my right arm was pulled in such a way over the top of the bed that my elbow was hyperextended and in serious pain. The cuff on my left hand was pinching the skin of my wrist. They left me like that for about another 20 minutes, then wheeled me down to the psychiatric ward.
When I got there, the doctors noted that my fingernails were blue, and took the restraints off. I couldn’t feel my arm at all. I was livid. They fed me a gross meal and gave me a room with an obese, foul mouthed girl who was banned from art therapy until she agreed to take a shower. I spent most of the time that night in my room wondering if I could break the window and kill myself on the shards of glass.
My husband had brought my medication with and given it to the ER people, but the staff decided that they weren’t going to give it to me because I was pregnant. The fact that my medication/pregnancy situation was being monitored by a private physician, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a genetic counsellor whose specialty was figuring out what kinds of things are damaging to developing fetuses didn’t seem to matter to them. So without my medication, things only got worse.
By the next day it had been 24 hours since I had felt my baby move and I was sure that he had died inside me. I also still couldn’t feel my arm, and dozens of handprint-shaped bruises had formed all over my body. The doctor on duty had me taken to X-ray to see if the security people had broken my arm. Fortunately the arm wasn’t broken, just severely bruised.
Breakfast and lunch were equally disgusting, but a night’s rest allowed me to notice the food and bugs on the floor of the general room, and in the cushions of the chairs (we weren’t allowed in our own rooms except at night). Most of the other people there were the kind of people you see roaming the streets pushing shopping carts and having discussions with thier hat. My only problem was a couple of days of missed medication, which they were making worse by withholding.
Eventually my psychologist came to visit me and was appalled at the conditions and the fact that they weren’t giving me my meds. She made a recommendation that I be released. Later that day I had a consultation with a different doctor. He concluded that there was nothing wrong with me other than that I had missed my medication, he gave me my medication on the spot, and scheduled me to be released later that day.
It took me a while to forgive my mom and my husband for putting me there… but I did.
>^,^<
“Cluemobile? You’ve got a pickup…”
OpalCat’s site: http://opalcat.com
The Teeming Millions Homepage: fathom.org/teemingmillions
Wow…
Not only could nobody possibly top that story - but it could be made into a movie of the week! With her new friend Ricki Lake as OpalCat!
(Not that I’d watch it)
“Well, roll me in eggs and flour and bake me for forty minutes!”
Being born. When I was older, my mom told me I was so irritated/annoyed/horrified at being born that I peed in the doctor’s face.
Opalcat:
The same damn thing happened to me! I also happened to give birth at a teaching hospital, so everytime the doctor came to examine me he’d bring 5 or six med students with and let them “practice” on me. Okay, I know, they gotta learn somehow, so that wasn’t so bad, except…they’d talk about my “case” like I wasn’t even in the room! It was creepy.
After my son was born, there was this one nurse’s aide who kept telling me that breastfeeding my son wasn’t really necessary and that he’d sleep longer with the bottle. WTF? I thought the idea was to encourage breastfeeding!
Yep, Opal wins. Man, for a 27-year old woman, you have had some serious crap go on in your life. ((Big hugs, girlfriend))
I’ve had surgery a bunch o’ times and all except one were actually almost pleasant experiences.
The only unpleasant experience was after my first sinus surgery. I woke up in the recovery room crying from the pain. Five feet away I could hear nurses bullsh*tting. I said, “Hello, hello…” and they ignored me… Never did come over to the bed until it was time to roll me down the hallway to my room.
I appreciate a little pampering - don’t treat me like the Queen of England, don’t treat me like a little kid, but just be nice. Remember that I’m scared and in pain. Explain what’s going to happen to me. Joke with me. Laugh at my nervous jokes. Help me stay warm. Hold my hand.
::sniff::
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, dogs are from Pluto. - Anonymous
I have another story, but it involves a doctor’s office instead of a hospital. First, a little background:
About a week before I got sick, I went to visit my Aunt at her house. They’d just taken in a stray cat infested with fleas. Being the tasty lady that I am, I was soon covered with bites up to my knees. Worse, it seems that I am really sensitive to flea spit cause each bite swelled up to about the size of a half-dollar. My legs were not a pretty site.
Okay, the next weekend I get about the sickest I’ve ever been. I couldn’t even keep a sip of water down, it was miserable. On Monday morning, my boyfriend had to go to work, and since he was reluctant to leave me home alone, he dropped me off at my Aunt’s house. She decides to take me to her physician (I got my healthcare at the University Clinic, which was closed because of sememster break) that afternoon. Great.
Well, we get there and he starts asking her what the problem was! Hello? I was 19 years old for christsakes! And she starts telling him how she thinks I have an eating disorder! Until I had a kid, I’d always weighed 120 at 5’10", skinny, but I have very small bones and my father,my aunt’s brother, weighed maybe, soaking wet, 180 lbs at 6’8" when he was my age. And I was very well known in my family for having a huge appetite.
Anyways, I am like what the fuck, I have a virus or maybe food poisoning, but nobody’s listening to me. I get on the scale and weigh in at 108, but I hadn’t kept anything down, including water, for 2 days so I wasn’t suprised that I’d lost so much weight. I expected the doctor to give me IV fluids or test for e coli, something medical, but insteads he tells my Aunt (again, not talking to me, but to her) that he want’s her to call my parents right away and have them get me admitted to a treatment facility.
I tried, as best I could in my weakened condition, to protest, but nobody would listen to me and finally my Aunt says, show him your legs. I’m thinking she wants him to prescribe me some ointment or something, since the bites are still red & swollen, but instead they both agree that this is confirmation that I am anorexic. WTF?!? I’ve never, ever, heard that bug bites were the symptom of eating disorders.
Finally, I get to leave, with out receiving any treatment whatsoever for my vomiting, just a list of psychaitrists. My Aunt promptly called my parents to tell them that I was at death’s door…they haven’t seen me for six months, so their worried. It took me a month to convince them that I was okay, since my Aunt kept telling them that I was in denial.
The worst part is, I was scared to go to the doctor for a couple of years afterwards. And my mother and my aunt still don’t talk to this day (my mom was furious when she finally heard the whole story.)
Sorry, if this post is long and rambling, I’m still pretty emotional about this 6 years later.
God bless America, tatertot! I’d be emotional too! You go with your bad self, walking out of there like that.
Sheesh, some people!
I have a theory ( not just one, but lots of em, infact) but the closer one lives to a doctor/hospital, the more sick you are.
I’ve shared this theory with several doctors and they agree with me. I have a very boring medical record and I plan to keep it that way.
My cousin lives about 3 miles from the hospital and doctor and has had his 14 month old to the emergency room at least 6 times in his first year alone and countless visits to the peditrician. ( his wife is a bit of a worry wart.) When he asked me how often I’ve had Carsten into the emergency room I replied, “None. By the time I get there he’s cured.”
(It’s a 45 minute drive to THE hospital that I would go to in a crunch situation.) Until this month, my son only went to the doctor for the well baby visits. Then it was twice in two days with a throat infection. I was in and out in under twenty minutes both times.
I also come from a family where the only time you go to the hospital is if you bleed on the carpet.
The only really scary hospital experience I can think of was when I had my gallbladder removed about ten years ago. Whenever you watch t.v. shows, they always show the nurse or the doctor waking up the patient very shortly after the surgery. Also, I’ve talked to family and friends who have told me the same thing, that the nurses make a point of waking you up while you’re still laying in the recovery room, usually no more than an hour or so after your surgery. In my case, they wheeled me into the operating room and put me under sometime between 8-8:30 a.m., and the next thing I remember is waking up in a darkened hospital room. I turned on the lights and saw that, according to the clock on the wall, it was almost 8 p.m.! I asked my doctor the next morning when I saw him if it was normal to sleep for 12 hours straight after a surgery. He got this funny look on his face and said something like “I’ll be right back”. It turns out that the nurses never even bothered trying to wake me up. I also found out that there was a least three different occasions during that period of time where I basically stopped breathing due to the respiratory depressant effect that anesthesia can have on a person who is sensitive to it. And the doctor knew nothing about this! They never called him to tell him that I was having problems in recovery, and he apparently never thought to check on me either during that time. The worst part was that even though I was sound asleep, they apparently thought that I was in pain, so they kept on giving me repeated shots of Demerol, which also causes respiratory depression.
Shadowfox
“Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with
great ambitions.”
I cannot even comprehend the horror of having to deal with this kind of an indicent.
I hope some of you at least sued the living shit out of the hospitals that did this to you. If you tell me that responsible parties got off without any repercussions, it’s going to ruin my whole day.
No laughing this morning, sorry.
Let’s see…worst experience I ever had was at a doctor’s office. I went in when I was about 16 to get a blood test for the first time. I’m not a fan of needles, so I was nervous, and I was getting a full work-up done, so I had been fasting for 12 hours. So…my parents say it’ll be over quickly, then they’ll take me out for breakfast.
Unfortunately, I apparently have the SMALLEST veins in the United States. The technician came in, tried both arms. No luck. Stuck me three times in both arms. Still no luck. (And I just want to second Melin on something…if you can’t find the damn vein, DON’T poke around with the needle when it’s still in my arm!!!) So, next we tried both wrists, which hurt like hell. Still no luck. Next both hands. Nope, no luck there either. (And of course by this time I’m sobbing.) Finally they strapped a blood pressure cuff on my arm and inflated it to get the veins to pop up. That worked, and I left the doctor’s office 2 and a half hours after I went in.
Of course…this marked the beginning of me having to get blood tests for lupus every 6 weeks. I no longer fear needles, that’s for sure…but it still takes forever to get blood drawn.
Remainder of horror story snipped…
I think that by and large the mental health system is fucked. I mean really, seriously screwed up.
The way I see this is: you wanted to leave and had every right to leave as a free adult who had committed no crime and was not presenting a danger to anyone. The moment they tried to stop you by force, they committed kidnapping and possibly assault.
This sort of thing really pisses me off. I’ve never (knock on wood) been anywhere near a mental health institution and so help me god I hope I never do. But a lot of people seem to leave worse than they went in due to being treated like this. And the “science” of psychology is, from what I’ve seen, about a half step more advanced than alchemy. There’s an enormous amount of bullshit in that field.
And you had every right to tell him to shove it. At this point, the way I see it, a random stranger is approaching you in a threatening manner and refusing to back off when told to. I believe that no matter WHAT his intentions are, you would be justified in treating this situation as an assault or even potential rape, and doing anything up to and including (god forbid it should go that far) killing him to make him stop.
That might sound like I’m making too much of it but I really don’t think I am. I believe in judging people by their actions, not their intentions. No matter what his intentions are, you don’t know this guy from adam. If you decide to trust him and agree to what he wants to do, so be it; you have that right. But you also have the right to say “no”, and if he won’t give you that option, the situation instantly becomes one where you have the right to defend yourself in any manner at all until he stops. “No” means the same thing for a mugger as it does for the frickin’ pope - the intentions of the perpetrator do not excuse that.
peas on earth
Wow… where to even begin… a few years back when my dad was dying, we went through several months of hell at one of the hospitals here in Edmonton. The staff was the worst. His organs were shutting down and therefore he was toxic and had periods of hallucination. I was going to the hospital before work, at lunch, and right after work through to the evening until he was tucked in and asleep. My mom spent the afternoons with him. There was virtually little time where one of us wasnt with him. On one Saturday morning… i slept in from exhaustion and didnt get there until 10. I found him tied to a chair, sitting in the middle of the hallway crying, his legs and hands were swollen like balloons. I untied him and got him into bed, and comforted him until he fell asleep. Then I went to raise hell at the nurses station. The nurses told me they didnt have time to watch him. When i inquired as to why they hadnt called one of us, they once again said no time. I requested that the doctor be called because obviously dad needed something to help with all the water he was retaining… one hour goes by… i go back… another hour goes by… still no doctor…another hour and by then i’d had it and threatened to call the newspaper… voila a doctor appeared in about 10 minutes. This was only one of many incidents during our lovely stay there… The thing that was the crusher was that my dad had requested a do not resusitate order. He wanted to go when it was time. I got a call at 1:30 in the morning that he had coded. I ran, picked up my mom, and headed for hte hospital expecting to just be able to say our good byes, knowing he had passed away. When we got there, dad was hooked up to a ventolator. The only doctor available was an opthamologist who didnt know about the dnr, the nurses didnt bother to say and they had revived him. Four hours later we took him off the vent and he passed away in peace. Oh yeah… one thing did happen that would have made dad laugh… just as our minister was giving him last rites… they started jackhammering outside the intensive care window… i started to laugh and cry at the same time, it was the storm before the calm…
thanks!!
We are, each of us angels with only one wing;
and we can only fly by
embracing one another
Sue,
I don’t know if it would have been bad or good, but if I would have been with you at the time you found your father strapped in a chair crying, there would have been some serious ass-kicking going on. I’m a peaceful guy, but situations like the one you just described can make me go berserk in a heartbeat. What an awful story, I’m so sorry for you. People deserve at least to be able to say goodbye (I’m referring to the ‘last days/weeks’ period rather than the actual moment of death) in a civilized manner.
And I can do nothing but admire you for the fact that you saw the humour in even that dire situation. My family have had a lot of people in and out of hospitals, and, for that matter, coffins (well, not OUT of coffins 
) over the last few years, and if it weren’t for our incomprehendible, black sense of humour, there’s no telling how we would have coped up till now.
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”