I'm very tired (hospital capers)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I was wrong about his gastro consult - it’s not until February. He has a cardio consult in a couple of weeks.

So now I’m going to have to try and get in touch with the gastro doc to see if we can get an appointment earlier. Yesterday was a good day, he was home all day, says he didn’t have any problems at all and was looking forward to trying to go to work.

He’s just woken up with the cramping again. It’s about five am. I’ve woken up with my own problems (pepperoni pizza. I love it, it hates me). So he’s now on the loungeroom floor with his bucket and a bottle of water and I’m considering what to do next.

I don’t want to take him to the ER just yet - there’s going to be nobody but the nursing and attendings on, so I’m looking at (if he can stand it) holding off until about seven or eight am then taking him down there.

I told my new Team Leader on Monday that my husband’s been ill, so I’m hoping if I do need a day or two off then they’re going to be cool with it. Because this time I’m going to stay at the hospital with my husband until I can talk to someone and hopefully get someone to take this seriously. I mean, I know they’re not brushing him off (for the most part, can’t help think last time he was only discharged because they were getting under the pump at about midnight) and I know that transitive gastro pain is an arse to diagnose properly and fix. But sometimes I wonder how much he’s telling them, if he’s telling them the whole truth or if he’s telling me everything. So I need to get in and stick my oar in there.

Re: private cover. I have, he hasn’t. We were (possibly wrongly in hindsight) under the impression that he couldn’t get private cover until he was a full resident. So we didn’t, and in the six months since he’s been granted it’s been one of those things that “We really need to get around to” but haven’t been able to due to money constraints. Which is why I’m so desperate to keep this job, because it frees up some money for him to get private cover.

22

Sierra, I feel so bad for your hubby and you. I am scared, though, that any ER would just treat recurring abdominal pain, especially pain that registers so high and is accompanied by vomiting, by merely reducing the pain and sending him home. Something that has gone on this long is not good (sorry if this makes you worry more). He needs to go back to the hospital and you get a doctor, not an intern or student, to see him. Do not accept another routine of doping him up and showing him the door.

I’ve taken my wife to the ER too many times and, if the care she is getting is not adequate, I will raise a royal stink. In fact, I become a major asshole. When my wife’s abdominal wound hemorrhaged and was pouring blood, I brought her in. The triage nurse told her to wait in the waiting room, next to the people with sniffles and coughs. I told her that my wife was bleeding and she just said , “Uh huh,” without even looking and started to turn away. I told the nurse, “Fine, we’ll wait. By the way do you have another towel we can use? This one is full,” and took the blood soaked towel that my wife had been using to staunch the flow and put it on the nurses desk. That made her do her job.

I realize that ERs are pressed for space and the whole idea of triage is to get the most seriously ill person taken care of first, but your hubby is not being helped. Sure, the symptom is being treated but the underlying cause is not. Be Mama Bear and be nasty and protective. Be vicious. Don’t take crap from them when they insist on discharging him.

23

Ivylad once had an allergic reaction to some medication. His head was twisted around on his neck, he could not sit comfortably, and his tongue was sticking out of his mouth. He looked like Quasimodo.

It got worse in the ER, and when I went back up to the triage and he followed me, I think he freaked them out so much they took him back immediately, and I heard a doctor yelling for Benadryl.

Weird experience.

Abdominal pain does not go on and on and on unless there is something wrong. Good luck in getting to the bottom of it.

24

I will just add to what people say. Abdominal pain can be very tricky. Unfortunately the usual ER is very different from what you see on television. There, the ER doctors do all sorts of tests and take time to care for the patients. Here, their function is to determine if the condition is life threatening. If so, they keep the patient stable until he/she can be admitted for definitive treatment. If not, they either hand the patient over to an admitting doctor, or discharge them. Once the decision to admit or discharge is made, they move on to the next patient. They rarely have time to do any in depth investigation; their job is to temporize while awaiting the admitting doctor.

Your husband needs a primary doctor who can take the time to fully assess him and then determine what additional tests are necessary.

25

Being an American I have no idea what the medical standards are in Australia. I know that if someone without health insurance went to the county hospital complaining of severe abdominal pains with accompanying vomiting and that it had been occurring for a long period of time, the patient would most likely be admitted. Especially if they had been to the hospital on several previous occasions complaining of the same symptoms. Hospitals are terrified of being sued if they don’t provide proper care.

Isn’t there something similar down under? A medical facility where they have to take you? Sure the care may not be as good as if you were paying for it, but there has to be something, right?

26

Missed the window. Please don’t take my post as being a smart ass or insulting. I’m genuinely curious if Australia has a “public” hospital for the uninsured.

27

Not necessarily re the admit on the uninsured pt here in the USA. It would depend a lot on what the tests showed. If his labwork came back clean, chances are he would have been discharged. It’s the return visits (to the same ER) that should have raised a red flag with someone. Unless they think he’s drug seeking*–if so, getting someone to really listen and Do something might be tricky. IMO, the OP needs to stay at the bedside and talk/advocate for her husband this time around.
*not that he is, I’m just relating a likely scenario–indeed the only scenario that explains their lackadaisical attitude towards this.

28

It’s a fight getting him to his PCP - if he’s not in pain, he won’t go. And he’s most often in pain outside hours, which means a trip to the ER. I’m working on him to try and get him to the doctor.

I don’t think the ER thinks he’s drug-seeking (that is a valid thought Eleanor. God knows the area we live in is pretty full on with druggies), because they give him morphine when it happens, without too many questions.

And they did admit him on the second occasion, but the specialists couldn’t find any cause and the pain had gone within about twelve hours, so they monitored him overnight then referred him for further examination and let him go. Unfortunately, whilst the standard of care is good (not great, but not terrible), the hospitals in our city are so overwhelmed they are really working on a “churn and burn” basis. That’s also part of why I think they released him on Sunday night - they had no beds in the wards, there were no specialists on to authorise a release of another patient or refer him to another hospital, so in the end they managed his pain and let him go.

This morning wasn’t a bad one in the end. It took about forty minutes, but he was able to get up and have a shower and actually ended up going to work. He seems to be okay at the moment. But there’s the rub. He’ll be fine for a week or so, then it’ll come on again in the middle of the night or at some other stupid time.

(on Preview) We do have public hospitals, Slypork. They’re just massively overrun, as I said above. On the day that they did admit him, it actually took them nearly fourteen hours to admit him into the ward. He was released a day later, after the pain had gone and stayed gone.

I’m trying on my own to see if we can rule out diet-related issues, just so if it happens again I can go to the doctor and say “We’ve ruled out wheat/dairy/gluten”. Or hell, so we can find out if it is one of them and manage accordingly. But he’s been resisting me on that as well, so I’m fighting two uphill battles with him at the moment. I think he’s afraid, and trying to take control of the situation in his own way. I don’t blame him. I know I have a tendency to do the same.

I think I’m making some headway. I’ve just got to keep working at it.

29

I’ve hesitated about posting this, because it doesn’t help the situation and I don’t have a solution that will, but the Lyell Mac has a really, really bad reputation for medical dumbassery.

Is there another public hospital nearby - I know you mentioned the Lyell Mac is the only one with an ER area - that your husband can see a specialist in when he’s not mid-episode?

30

There’s always TQEH. But seriously though…

I would work on getting your husband to the GP who can oversee all the investigations and referrals that may be necessary outside of a “crisis mode” situation. Do the guilt thing, “think of me and how I have to keep my job and how tired I am, it would be a lot easier for me if you got this sorted out in office hours”.

31

How about Gawler Public Hospital? I’ve seen a couple of specialists out of there and was pretty impressed by how efficient the hospital seemed to be. Only about 20 minutes down the road by car - or about the same plus a short walk (if you’re not actively sick - a very long walk if you are) from the train.

Honesty compels me to admit that one of the specialists I saw *also *consults out of the Lyell McEwin… but unless Sierra Indigo’s husband needs an endocrinologist I wouldn’t call that a compelling point for the hospital. :wink:

32

On the “mystery diagnosis” shows I’ve seen on Discovery Health Channel, the situation you describe is pretty much always caused by someone poisoning the victim with arsenic. Usually the spouse. I’m assuming you’re not trying to do him in ;).

The more serious part (now that I’ve gotten that wise-ass remark out of the way) is: is there any chance he might be getting exposed to some sort of environmental thing, or allergen? Have you tried keeping a diary of places gone, things done, foods eaten etc. for a few days to see if anything seems to correlate to the attacks? As in, any sort of food allergy or sensitivity, or exposure to an airborne allergen, or something of the sort?

Sorry for the quip, yeah I do have a strange sense of humor but sometimes, finding something, anything, to laugh about in the middle of all the crap can be very therapeutic.

33

Heh. I had a little snicker. I spent a damned lot of money and time importing him from the UK and convincing the govt that I wanted to keep him - I’m not planning on offing him any time soon (plus he’s got shit-all life insurance) :wink:

re: the QEH and Gawler hospitals - if it comes to a longer-term stay or whatever, I’ll be considering another hospital. But unfortunately when an attack comes on in the middle of the night, the Mac is our best option. Neither of us drives, which means in terms of taxi time the Mac is the easiest and quickest one to get to.

I’m trying to impress on him the need for some sort of food diary. I can keep track of what he eats at home, but with both of us working all day unfortunately I can’t do the same at other times. Unfortunately he’s still resisting me on a lot of things, and whilst he doesn’t know what it is, he’s got it in his head that it’s not food related and a food diary would be a waste of time. He’s scared, and being scared he’s resisting things I’m trying to do/get him to do. I don’t blame him, I tend to do the same when I’m freaked out.

Right now the spasms seem to be over. But now we’re at day four without him eating anything more substantial than some ice cream, some jello and some meal supplement shakes. So now I’m trying to figure out what I can feed him that’s high-cal enough to help stop him losing any more weight (by estimation I’d say he’s lost at least two or three kilos in the last two months. And he was skinny to start with), but that’s bland enough that if this is food related, it won’t set him off again.

34

I know someone who was recently on an ‘exclusion diet’ to establish where her allergies lay, and she was allowed to eat white rice, potatoes, pears, and some other stuff I can’t recall - but I can find out if you like?

Apparently the theory is that nobody (or hardly anyone) is allergic to those items.

It’s not super high-cal, but maybe you can make up some basic rice dishes/risottos?

35

Well, they have to do something now.

Last night I had to get him back to hospital. In an ambulance this time.

He was vomiting blood. When he threw up on Wendesday, I thought it looked red but he was drinking red cordial and eating red jello for most of the day. I could fucking kick myself now, though, because I asked him if it was blood and stupidly I believed him when he said that it wasn’t.

But last night he couldn’t tell me it wasn’t blood. And then he couldn’t stop throwing it up. And then he tried to get to the toilet, collapsed and… It came out the other end. I was fucking terrified. And he wouldn’t fucking listen to me when I told him to sit the fuck down and stop moving, to have a drink and to stay still. I’d called my mum to come take us to the hospital, but when he collapsed and it all came out the other end is when I called the ambulance.

He was lucid in the ambulance, able to give the tech answers to all of his questions whilst we were riding there. Then when we got to the hospital the started a blood transfusion and started puming him full of fluids. His colour came back and he got a lot better looking. They also gave him a catheter. He’s none to impressed with that. He’s been in the ICU overnight for obs, and they’ve got the gastro coming this morning and (hopefully) he’ll get that fucking endoscopy that they’ve said he needed but didn’t bother giving to him last time. They let me come in to see him, but they were still fussing around him at the time and it was nearly mdinight, so I went home.

Mum and my grandparents cleaned the house while I was at the hospital, then mum came to the hospital and got me, then took me back to her house. I’ve barely slept all night. I mean, I did sleep but I’ve been up every two hours or so to go to the toilet or get a drink or just fret a little. I’m trying not to fret now, they’ve got to do something and they can’t just release him this time, but I’m not going to work today. I’m going back to the hospital once mum’s awake and can get me down there, and I’m going to Mama Bear until they find out what’s going on and try to fix it.

36

Dammit, Sierra!

I’m sorry your husband got so ill, but maybe now they can figure out what’s wrong. And don’t you be afraid to be Mama Bear with him, and tell him to keep his butt in bed until you’re comfortable he’s been treated correctly.

I find many people try to deny that they’re sick. Yes, your husband is afraid, but quite frankly, if one is going to bitch and not do anything to solve the problem, one loses the right to bitch.

Give him a kiss, smile sweetly, and tell him he’s going to be a good boy and do what you say until he’s better.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you.

37

Go, baby, go. If it helps your mind at all when you need to be forceful, just remember all the dopers here that are pulling for y’all and muster up the energy that we’re sending your way.

38

Thanks guys.

The one thing I’m glad for is that last I saw, he’s hooked up to every machine in the ICU bar the breathing one, and he’s got a catheter. So he’s not going anywhere until they let him go. And they’re not letting him go until I get some answers. The gastro doc probably won’t be in until mid-morning so hopefully they won’t do anything much to him until I get there.

I’ve got to wait until mum gets up before we can go. She should be up shortly, because she knows I’m desperate to get back there and make sure I’m with him this time. I’m not going to work today, and I’m just hoping that they’ll be able to find it and make him better. I’ve never been so scared in my life.

39

He’s in the right place now and I’m sure your work will understand. Good luck with it all and I hope he’s home soon, sans catheter :slight_smile:

40

It’s okay to be scared. Make sure your mum can be with you, so if you fall apart she can be Mama Bear for awhile until you can take over again.

I gather his parents are not nearby? Have they been notified?