:eek: I’m really sorry to hear that, gobear! Please keep us posted on how your doing.
On the other hand, you are in a hospital room with Internet access! 
What AvaBear said reminded me of another thing that’s unfortunate, but true. Whenever you’re in the hospital, if at all possible have an assertive family member around to intervene on your behalf if needed. I’ve been on both sides of this. When you’re feeling so bad, you often don’t want to be assertive (crabby, bitchy, cantankerous, whatever) just because you don’t have the energy, or because you don’t want to annoy those people on whom you depend for the necessities of life.
Sometimes your family member or friend can do stuff for you (get you ice chips, for example) that the staff doesn’t have time for. Or they can go remind someone that you’re still waiting for that bedpan, or pain med, or that you just threw up.
When my father was enduring what turned out to be his terminal illness, my sister and I would run interference all the time. And the staff got to know that somebody might be stopping by at any time, and would be mighty peeved if we found him in pain or in a mess. Once I pointed out his health care directive to the on-duty nurse (it was right in his charts, but she hadn’t noticed) and another time I called the doctors to get them to direct the nurses to give him all the pain meds he needed.
No, I’m home. I got cut on Friday, went home on Saturday.
I understand the problems with staffing and the nurse to patient ration in hospitals–my mom’s a psych nurse–but when I’m lying in a hospital bed with a hole in my gut at 4 am, I don’t have the patience to consider the economic situation of the medical field, I want my damn painkillers NOW!
The 47 500 nurses in Quebec went on a general unlimited strike on June 26th, 1999. Their collective agreement had expired on the 30th of June, 1998. The public was behind them 100%. My grandmother had been admitted to the hospital on July 1st; though she was suffering horribly from the lack of care and staff, every time I left the hospital after changing her diaper, I honked for the picket line outside the hospital. I was administering her drugs. I was cleaning her. I was changing her diapers. I was there as much as possible; they were forced to tie her to the bed when I wasn’t there, due to lack of staff.
Though the nurses rejected many “agreement in principal’s” that were proposed to them as the best they could get from their union (sorry, I’m translating from French and I don’t know the English terminology for this), they continued to pursue negociations with the Government of Quebec. They showed a willingness in ending the deadlock by resuming work for 48 hours.
The nurses’ main deadlock issues were salaries, vacation time, and working conditions. Though they are provincial government employees, they did not enjoy the same %5 raises that were given to other public servants.
Six days into the strike, the National Assembly invoked a “back-to-work law”, making the strike illegal.
Mrs. Jennie Skene, president of the nurse’s union, basically sold them out at the end. The nurses did not get what they were asking for; they had the public’s full support. The kicker is: After the collective agreement was signed, the nurses ended up being FINED for striking “illegally”.
When I had appendicitis, I went to the doctors office at almost noon on a Saturday. The doctor I saw sent me for blood work. When it came back, he told me he thought it was appendicitis, but to go home and go to the emergency room later, if it got worse. I went home, laid on the couch took a nap. When I woke up at 4:00pm, I could not walk. My husband had to help me hobble to the car and carry me into the emergency room. When we got to the ER, the doctor on call checked me out, did more blood work and decided it was in fact appendicitis. But before all this, he did a pelvic exam. Fine, I suppose, in case he is making sure it’s not a ovarian cyst. Then comes the kicker… He does a breast exam. After the it was over and the dr and nurse left the room, I remember thinking he could have at least asked me out to dinner before feeling me up. Or left a $20 on the table. So by 6:00pm, I was in so in so much pain, I couldn’t hardly stand it. They started prepping me for surgery. Only there was no surgeon available. The surgeon that practices with the clinic that is associated with the hospital is away at a conference. They call in another surgeon, it takes over an hour for him to get there. I was so dehydrated they couldn’t get the IV in. I was so frustrated and in so much pain, I was crying. Finally the surgeon comes in and starts talking to me. He doesn’t speak English very well, I could not understand him at all. So after 8pm on a Saturday night, I finally get taken in to the OR. I remember waking up on Sunday a few times. I remember my mom bringing my kids to visit me, but I couldn’t stay awake. Late Sunday night, I did fully wake up. Sitting by the bed is the first doctor I saw. The one that sent me home. He told me the my appendix had ruptured as they were opening me up. While they were in there, I woke up. I do not remember any of it. I guess I had told them that I could feel what they were doing and it hurt. He wanted to know what I had felt. I told him I didn’t remember waking up. He sat there for a while, then left. I was only billed for one night at the hospital ( Saturday night ) but I stayed two nights. ( Saturday and Sunday night ) I was glad to go home and suffer away from people.
My bad experiences have nothing to do with the nurses, just the doctors.
misstee,
What a nightmare!
Just to counterpoint it, several years ago my then pre-teen daughter woke up in the middle of the night with awful abdominal pain. When it hadn’t gone away by afternoon, we called the pediatrician, who saw her right away, even though it was a Sunday. Bottom line was the surgeon and pediatrician were not sure it was appendicitis; some of the symptoms did not clearly point to that. But they explained that the risks of operating needlessly were far outweighed by the risks of doing nothing and being wrong. By 6:30 p.m. she was out of surgery and had a most uneventful recovery.
Was the doctor who mis-diagnosed (and mishandled, IMHO) you a doctor you saw regularly?
Here’s hoping you recover quickly, gobear. Sending you some good vibes, man.
That was me. Came down with it on a friday afternoon and didn’t go to the doctor until Monday! It turned out to be chronic appendicitis so it was a tad different, but that was still a long weekend. There weren’t 100% sure what it was for a while, so I didn’t have it out until 7 weeks after I initially started having problems. A week from today will be one year since I had it yanked. Thankfully, though, my surgeon let me go home the same day it was removed. Sorry you had a bad experience gobear. Hope they gave you some good drugs. Laying down and getting up is a bitch.
Hey, did they tell you how big it was? Mine was the size of a sausage.
Right, TMI.
No offense to the RNs here, but nurses are piss freaks. They need their samples. They need to stick rulers into “urinals” (plastic pitchers) to measure how much you’ve peed.
I had a perianal abscess in early 2000. They didn’t find it on my first visit to the ER on the Wednesday of that week (idiots), so they sent me home with a script for Percocet and told me to take sitz baths. Then the thing grew and ruptured internally. Very dangerous.
Back at the ER, they finally acknowledged something was seriously wrong, and sent me for a CAT scan. Now, for this, I had to drink something like a litre and a half of iodine water. I was already bloated as it was. And then I had to pee, but you see, the infection or something was squeezing my prostate gland and tubes, so I - just - couldn’t - pee. The CAT techs were like hemming and hawing as I was standing there, half behind the machine, trying to piss into yet another blue plastic pitcher.
Then I get wheeled up to my room before the operation. They want me to pee into another pitcher. I discovered the only way I could pee was to submerge my goodies in warm water, as that somehow relieved the pressure. But that wasn’t kosher, because then they couldn’t collect it and measure it.
After the operation, I kept waking up during the night to pee. Nurse Ratched had given me another blue pitcher into which she was now gleefully sticking a ruler every hour on the hour. She actually walked in on me trying to do my thing, waited, then measured again, saying snarkily, “Well, now you’re just trying to impress me.” (Because I was finally able to pee, with the abscess and pus and stuff sucked out.)
At least I got to try lots of different narcotics.
And yes, I know that there’s a good reason to measure how much the patient pees. The point is, when someone’s got a heavy-duty infection with major inflammation down there, don’t expect it to come a-flowin’ out.
An update
I’m feeling better and I’m going back to work today. I wanted to yesterday, but it still hurt too much to move. Taking the day off to rest was a good idea, even if it felt decadent to stay home on a weekday.
Thanks for the kind thoughts and the stories. . . I feel positively fortunate that not getting pain pills was the worst problem I had. My surgeon didn’t tell me anything about my appendix other than it was intact when they cut it out, for which I’m grateful.
Be careful not to overdo it, gobear. Abdominal surgery is nothing to fool around with. Don’t be ashamed to take another day or several off until you’re fully healed. I’m glad you’re feeling so much better.
In the clinic we go to, the doctors rotate. The only way to be sure you are going to see the same doctor is if you’re pregnant, or you set your appointment up way way in advance. I had seen both doctors before. The one who sent me home just retired, the one who felt me up was just recently asked to resign. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one he felt up, the paper just said “inappropriate relations with patients”. The other frustrating part was they didn’t have a surgeon on call. We are in a very small communitity, less than 5,000 people, it would have been nice for them to have had someone on call, instead of searching for a surgeon.
gobear, the company I worked for at the time, gave me 2 weeks off, with 40% of my regular wages. I could have went back to work after the first week, but heck, if they were going to pay me to be home and play video games, who was I to stop them.