Mom says someone hit her

The BBQ Pit
1

My Mom was recently in the hospital again, she was over medicated there and aspirated causing her to be put on a ventilator.

While there she was very agitated one day and indicated to my sister in writing that someone had hurt her but not how. When I went in during the next visiting time Mom also indicated to me that she had been hurt and with head shakes and nods as well as signals let me know someone had hit her.

I went to the patient advocate as soon as they arrived and told them this, I also told them to leave it be until Mom was off the vent and out of ICU so I could actually talk with her, (it is not possible to speak with that tube down your throat.)
because Mom was tied down in there and helpless and I didn’t want anything else happening to her !

Two days after she was off the vent and on a regular floor, one of Mom’s favorite nurses came in and with no prompting or prior discussion with her (I wanted to give her another day or two to recover from that before I talked to her about it.)
Mom herself told the nurse that someone had hit her in ICU.
The next morning I went back to the patient advocate and told them this, now one is calling me trying to say Mom imagined it due to the drugs she was on in ICU. Bull fucking shit !

I was and still am livid, how dare someone do that to her !!! ??? My Mother is dying of cancer, the doctors say with no further infections or pnemunoia we MAY have 3 to 4 months with her. The last fucking thing we want her to have in her life is abuse.

Mom can’t tell us which nurse hit her, this is the only reason you guys haven’t read about me being in jail, no motherfucker is going to hit her and walk away undamaged if I know who they are. I am beyond pissed off and I am sick of people trying to play cover our asses over this. They also tried to tell us she wasn’t over medicated, sorry but I was there, I saw how out of it she was . AND her doctor told us 3 different times times that Mom was over medicated > She had received methadone, morphine, benadryl, saraquil, zanax that night, very close together. (OK I probably spelt most, if not all of them wrong.)

All I want is the name of the person (and I use the word loosely) who hit my Mom, if I find it I promise they will not hit anyone else’s Mother ever again, I am calm enough now not to kill them, but they will be lucky to be able to get a job scrubbing toilets in a hospital if I find out.

The saddest part is this is supposed to be one of the best hospitals around.

It takes a sorry assed lowlife to hit a woman who is on a vent, tied down and dying a little every damn day. I hope no one ever does anything like that to them or their Mom. No one deserves that. Fucker.

2

:eek: :confused: :eek: :confused:

Holy shit! How awful!

I know there was just a big shake up here in Canada when someone hid a camera and got staff members abusing patients on film. Perhaps you could do something like that if she has to go to the ICU again?

3

{{{{Ayesha}}}}

Wait until you’ve got your mum’s testimony from her own mouth, when she can talk–and then let 'em have it. Take your complaint as far as you can, if nobody will listen, and don’t give up.

4

Wow Ayeeeee, sorry to hear about moms! Let her recover a bit and try to get the story worked out a bit more. When in doubt, retain a lawyer to talk to her and make contact with the patient Liaison and see if that gets them to straighten up a bit. You’d be amazed at what a letter from a legal professional can do for someone’s attitude!

Sam

P.S.- good to see you, how ya doin these days? :slight_smile:

5

How upsetting!

I do think it would be worth your while to find out more about the side effects of her medications during the night in question? Don’t you want to rule out hallucinations as a possibility?

6

** alice_in_wonderland ** Mom is now with hospice, I doubt we will ever have her in ICU again. Hospice does not do life saving measures, they offer “comfort care” . If a nurse is there and Mom crashes they will not even do CPR. We will have to call 911 if she decides to keep her current full code and life support allowed for 7 days orders in place.

** Kythereia ** We did get the story from Mom, she is the one who told the nurse on the floor. And as I said I had not even mentioned it to her at that point.
My sisters had not either, we decided I would deal with this problem myself to avoid confusion. There are five of us and if we all tried to deal with it there would be mass confusion and hysterics.

** GaWd ** I wanted to avoid threats of getting a lawyer involved but it looks like I may have to. As for me, well I am here and sane, well, as sane as I ever was.

** CrankyAsAnOldMan ** I have checked into that, she was getting 6 mg of morphine every 4 hours at the time. She was also started on a drug they use for people on vents that day, but it wasn’t until after this happened that this drug was started. I am unsure of the name of it but it is a milky looking stuff that is given by IV drip. I am sure at this point it was real, not a hallucination

7

Ayesha, the key is to not threaten to involve a lawyer. Either use one or not, but don’t threaten them with it because they’ll just roll their eyes and consider you less of a threat. Most PI attorneys and probably even some eldercare attorneys will interview her on site and they know what can be done, should be done and what should be avoided.

Hang in there.

Sam

8

I’m terribly sorry about your mom’s experience. My heart goes out to you both, and your whole family.

The milky white IV was almost surely Diprivan, a sedative-hypnotic used for ‘conscious sedation’.

I’d have another run at the patient advocate, at least asking for some explanatin of how it was determined that your mom hallucinated it. It sounds like the pt advocate isn’t very good at his/her job. When I was an ICU nurse, the pt advocate was always exactly that - the patient’s advocate. The ones I worked with were universally dedicated and outstanding. Their role was like an ombudsman. They saw their role as independent from the hospital administration, and felt they worked for the patient/family in an even truer sense than everyone else at the hospital. They took the patient’s/family’s side, and championed their cause. Sounds like you got a poor patient advocate.

I have no reason to doubt that exactly what your mom described happened to her. It does happen, and it’s horrible. Keep the possibility in mind, though, that your mom did hallucinate, or that something benign was filtered through the drugs and interpreted as an assault. It doesn’t need to be an out-and-out psychotic hallucination. sometimes things can get all sorts of distorted throught the fog of drugs, and the ICU isn’t always the gentlest place. I administered a ‘precordial thump’ to a woman who had gone into a potentially lethal arrhythmia, successfully restoring her heart to a normal rhythm. It took showing her (and her family) the rhythm strip to finally convince her I didn’t just haul off an hit her (then she was most appreciative!). Another patient told a fantastic story, at least a year after the fact, of being serially tortuted with near-suffocation, replete with menacing late-night personnel. She was being weaned off the vent over the course of several weeks. It’s a harrowing ordeal.

Again, I’m not doubting your mom. Not at all. I’m not an apologist nor a denier. I’ve seen too much to dismiss such claims outright as hallucination . But hallucination or misinterpretation is a real possibility. I know it’s difficult when loved one says they were hit, to have someone say your loved one hallucinated it. And I know I’d need somethng other than conjecture and ‘no one admitted it’ to accept hallucination as the culprit. It could, however, be the case.

Agree with GaWd on the lawyer approach if the patient advocate provides nothing more than “we can’t prove it happened, so we’re going with it didtn’t”. I’d at least talk to one.

Hospital employees/medical types who abuse patients are the absolutely lowest scum.

My sympathies and support to you.

Jake

9

You’ve got the right idea, then. :slight_smile: Now follow the advice of everyone else in this thread and nail them!

10

PAtient advocate? HAH!

Hospitals want one thing … yer money.

And make sure whoever you use is NOT affliated with the hospital at all!

And specially never never never talk candidly to a hospital social worker.

11

First off, Sorry to hear about your mother. I ran across many terminal cancer patients in my day and its not easy for anyone involved.

From a medical standpoint you may wish to consider a few things.

Overmedication:
The nurses have specific orders as to the drug, route, rate, dosage, and time of administration that are determined by the doctor. If there are medication errors by the nurses involved in her overmedication, that is one thing. Reactions to a cocktail of meds like your mother is on are reviewed by pharmacy to intercept meds that may react with each other unfavorably. Nurse do a good job, but pharm has the training to catch the subtleties and the exotics.

The assault:
I am unable from my POV to make any kind of real observations about your mothers mental status, but. She is on a decent load of heavy painkillers and sedatives. Something as mundane as a blood draw by a phlebotomist may be percieved as an attack through all those meds. Yes, it didn’t feel good, but wasn’t an attack upon her person. My FIL spent quite a while denying he had had the endoscopy he was scheduled for and he is normally a perfectly alert oriented 70 year old guy.

I don’t know about your scenario but most of the ICU’s I have seen are pretty open areas with clear views of most of the patients, and lots of room to work. Smacking a patient would probably at least garner a few glances in that direction from other nurses in the area because its not a normal noise. With ICU patients you usually have 2 patients per nurse which means quite a few people around.

One of the things nurses fear the most is suspension or loss of licensure. Being involved in suppression of patient abuse evidence would jeopardize their licencsure. Firing them is not really a threat in such a high demand job market. Thus the incentive to cover up is tiny at best. In addition threatening nurse with discipline for reporting abuse can bring involvement from accredation groups that can give a hospital a serious pounding that no lawsuit ever could.

Last but not least, it may not be a nurse at all. Housekeeping, respiriatory therapists, lab techs

12

I will be the first one to support the fact that hospitals are indeed a business.

However, the nurse on the floor could generally care less about your billing arrangements, even if they bothered to look it up.

13

First and foremost I offer my deepest and most sincere sympathies to you and your mother’s situation.

As a Respiratory Therapist, allow me to add my two cents from the description you’ve given so far:

As mentioned earlier, Diprivan is the drug of choice in sedating an intubated, mechanically ventilated patient. It is considered a standard of care in those patients that can tolerate it. It is known to lower blood pressure but is almost always used when BP can be controlled and lipid levels are not too high (very rare). I would want to know why it was withheld at the time she was placed on the ventilator. Adding 6 mg of morphine, xanax, and methadone to the mix and you’re in La La Land. Ask the attending doctor specifically why it not used earlier. Write down his/her answer in front of them. Ask them to back it up with documentation.

Ventilated ICU patients are susceptible to psychoses even without these drugs. They are turned and bathed. They are prisoners in their beds. They can’t communicate. They have no sense of time and usually place. They are lifted for x-ray cassettes. They have their ECG leads and dressings changed. They get their breathing tube retaped. They get poked with needles and IV catheters. They get mouth care. They dream. They hallucinate. They have amnesia. They hurt! Lots of really ugly things happen to people on life support.

I have to disagree with the notion that she was likely assaulted, but I will totally agree that she believes she was. Yes, patients are sometimes abused, but the ICU is not a very private area and there are usually witnesses. However, this does not mean that she wasn’t, and I imply no disrespect. I could go on and on for pages with stories patients have told me of things that happened to them while intubated.

Was there any bruising, swelling, discoloration or fractures at the site of the assault? If she so vividly recalls the assault, would she able to ID her assailant if she saw the person? If so, and if you remain dissatisfied with the Patient Advocate’s remedy, I suggest you call the police and file assault charges. That is the only way you will get an unbiased investigation to your satisfaction IMO. They will be able to bring all the people that had access to her and ask questions and possibly have her identify them. Then, you can hire a lawyer.

Man, what a horrible situation you guys are in. I feel so sorry for her because I know she is convinced that it happened, whether it did or not, and you gotta stand by your mom. I would.

My thoughts are with you.

(On preview, I see a lot of this is covered. Submitting anyway.)

14

Let me get this straight. Your mom is being over medicated with multiple narcotics and other drugs ( methadone, morphine, benadryl, saraquil, zanax) is convinced she was hit, but has no idea who hit her. Logically there is no reason or motivation for for anyone to hit her, yet she is convinced that they did, and your response to the common sense suggestion that it might possibly be a drug induced hallucination response to the horse killing drug cocktail she was on is “Bull-fucking-shit!”?

I appreciate your protectiveness toward your mother, but I have had a considerable amount of experience with older ladies on mind altering substances when I was growing up, and I am here to tell you drugs (and lot less than your mother was taking) will make people imagine stuff that they will swear up and down is real, and yet never occurred.

You need to step back and logically consider all the facts of the situation before you go charging into battle on this issue.

15

If someone had hit my mother I would feel exactly as you do.

But I want you to consider the possibility that this was a halucination.

A year ago I was in the ICU. The morphine caused me to halucinate regularly. I am a middle-aged man with a sharp mind, whose friends describe as having an exceptional memory. But under morphine I just could not always tell what was real and what was not. As an example, one morning my anestesiologist walked in and said “If Anthony had never met Cleopatra, how would the world be different?” I wasn’t sure if this was a hallucination or not. I wasn’t sure if it was a riddle, or whether he was just playing with my mind (which would be really funny to me, if he was) or if he had actually asked the questior or if he actually was there.

I think you have done the correct thing by reporting this to the patient advocate. But I’m not sure how you can be sure it really happened, if you weren’t there. As E72521 said, I am sure that she believes it. But drugs are a funny thing, and I speak from experience.

My advice is to stay vigilent, keep a journal reporting all that your mother tells you and the dates and times. Act if you have to, but I wouldn’t get a lawyer involved at this time. Think about the fact that you will have to prove this in court. From you evidence so far, I don’t think you can.

16

None of it matters at this point. Mom had a massive heart attack, at this point she is still alive, not for long from what the doctors say. We over rode the hospice care she left the hospital on and called 911, Mom had not reciended her full code , life support for a week, order yet .

All of my sisters came back. I feel like a fucking vulture waiting for her to die damn it to hell. I came home for a nap, a bath and I’m going back in an hour. We are with her every minute. No matter what she will not be hit no, no matter what actually did or didn’t happen before.

If a mod will weigh in with an ok I will ask the LIONsob ( my husband) to update thisfor me as we go along. Don’t know when I will be home again.

Ladies and Gentlemen I have seen hell, it is holding your Mother down while she screams your name and begs you to help for 90 minutes with her kicking and flailing like a bull. waiting and telling a doctor to put her into a coma if that is what it takes to stop the pain. She fought 5 of us off yesterday, we had to hold her to keep her from harming herself. It is possible the cancer reached her brain. If so it happened quickly, she was not like this Thursday, she had the heart attack in the wee hours Friday am.

17

My heart breaks for you, Aye. I’m so very, very sorry.

18

So sorry to hear, Ayesha. Stay strong.

Sam

19

What a hard go.

Peace for all and hang tough…

You have lots of folks praying …

20

Oh, Ayesha, I’m so very sorry.