The Curious Case of the Red Ass
The hospital is usually a place for healing, a place for the sick, and a place to get better. For me this month it’s been a place of red ass.1 My mother’s been sick the latter part of this month but not entirely of her own doing. This whole ordeal made me more angry than I’ve been in my entire life. It’s made me question many things, including my own sanity at one point. I haven’t discussed many personal situations in my life before now here, but there’s always a beginning for everything. This is going to be an extremely long read, and might be written progressively worse as I recall everything; bear with me.
Anyone who’s been following me on Twitter has noticed for the most part for the past week or so I’ve been monotonous in my tweets. My tweets mostly consisted of curse words and anything to do with doctors, my mother, or the hospital itself which would probably constitute both tone and subject respectively. My mother was being dealt an injustice in my opinion, and was suffering due to medical malpractice.
My mother is a 45 kg (100 lb), 65 year old woman who at a very young age contracted polio, and as a result she has post polio syndrome which has caused her to have scoliosis and osteoperosis for the majority of her life. Many people who’ve known her her entire life don’t even know that. She doesn’t speak of it. She doesn’t and hasn’t let it be a hinderance. She’s smoked nearly her entire life, so decided since she was on Medicare to go to the doctor to quit smoking. She decided to go to my father’s general practice doctor. Having not been to any doctor in 20 years or more he decides to go on a fishing expedition by running tests on her. One of the tests was a bone density test which in her case is superfluous as it’s obvious that she already has osteoperosis.
She goes along with it and decides to go to the hospital for the test on the 12th. They lie her flat on a cold, hard table when she’s incapable of doing so. After thirty minutes lying in a position which causes her extreme pain her entire back goes into a massive muscle spasm when she gets up off the table. Despite the pain she drives herself home and sits in her chair the entire weekend taking small amounts of over-the-counter pain medication when the pain becomes unbearable.
That following Monday she has an appointment and goes to the doctor’s office. When she states she has trouble breathing the doctor gives her a chest x-ray. The chest x-ray reveals that she has fluid in her chest cavity and within her lungs. I have no medical degree at all, much less a doctorate in any form of medicine or practice but from looking at her x-ray I would have deduced that the fluid in her chest cavity was from her back injury as her heart isn’t enlarged to show congestive heart failure.2 The fluid in her lungs would have obviously been pneumonia too my eyes, and an examination of the white blood cell count in her blood would have been the next step. He instead states she has COPD and congestive heart failure, and that she needs to go to the hospital. She refuses to go, instead wanting him to give her antibiotics for pneumonia and some pain medication for her back. He refuses to admit it’s pneumonia and prescribes her one 75 mg percoset every four hours for her back with a followup appointment at my father’s cardiologist the upcoming Friday.
She’s driven home by my sister, takes a percoset, and is braindead for almost two days straight. In a three day period she takes two and a half pills. By that Thursday she’s nothing more than a vegetable. Knowing something was completely wrong my sister drives her to the doctor’s office. He puts her in the hospital, telling the nurses she overdosed herself on pain medication. When she’s initially brought into the ICU the nurses are resentful believing she is yet another drug addict who overdoses themselves during the Christmas holidays due to deep depression. She’s put into a room, given methadone to remove the effects of the pain medication, and instantly shows signs of having a massive breathing problem as the pain medication disguised the fact she had one. They check her vitals and find that her O2 levels are near-death levels and her CO2 levels were so high her blood was acid. She’s instantly put on a machine to force oxygen in her and to release the carbon dioxide. Immediately afterwards they perform a chest x-ray which to a pulmonary doctor shows she has pneumonia.
From reading my mother’s charts originally written by her general practice doctor the pulmonary doctor sees that she’s been diagnosed with COPD. He does the usual, going to my sister and asking for family history. She repetitively tries to tell the doctor that prior to that previous Friday she was perfectly fine. He ignores that fact and continues to believe the general practice doctor’s misdiagnosis. My father’s cardiologist who she had the appointment with shows up and is the only one to believe us, knowing that we aren’t idiots from his experience of taking care of my father. He examines the chest x-ray and sees pneumonia. He states that she could have COPD, but a test would need to be performed first for that. His personal opinion was that she did not have it, however. He stated that from the x-ray the right side of her heart was enlarged a slight bit, but it could be from smoking for 50 years or due to the extra strain the heart was going through from having severe pneumonia. He wanted to do a heart cath to make sure that it was what he thought, but that would come after she got out of the ICU.
She’s left in the ICU for a few days where each day we could see that she was getting progressively better, but those days weren’t without incident. Each day she sees a different pulmonary doctor, each with the personality of a rotted piece of wood. Each day we would tell them she was fine that previous Friday, and each day we would be essentially told we were stupid and that a small woman with post polio syndrome would be perfectly capable of disguising a severe case of COPD. We kept our mouths shut, knowing full well that was bullshit as we know two people with severe cases and neither were able to hide it before having to be permanently plugged into oxygen– neither having severe physical diseases either. She was eventually let out of the ICU and put into a room after spending a needless day in the unit waiting for a replacement pulmonary doctor at 18:00 to show up to act as if he was checking up on her.
She is moved to a room where she begins to stagnate, not getting any better only getting more angry with each passing day as she can do nothing but sit there and watch TV. On Christmas Eve we receive notification that her general practice doctor has decided to go on vacation for five days and somehow forgot to mention such the day prior. We would be seeing one of four different replacement doctors that morning sometime. That morning at 8:00 she was scheduled for a heart cath which was performed at 6:30 instead. She wasn’t found to have any problems with her heart, and while he had control over her healthcare in the lab he gave her a lung pressure test which showed she didn’t have COPD and barely even had emphysema even after 50 years of smoking. As a result both he and the pulmonary doctors release her from their care. Under both doctors’ opinions she should go home that day.
She returns to her room where she awaits the replacement general practice doctor who shows up and states that she will not be going home as she is still too weak, but when I ask him if he could stay there for a minute or so for my sister to make it to the room from the first floor he lies and states he has a call from the ER he has to handle. He subsequently spends 20 minutes at the nurse’s station looking at paperwork for other patients on the floor instead of rushing to a fictional emergency room. At that point I become more angry than I had been in my entire life believing that he should be let go as trusting a liar to take care of my mother wasn’t an option in my opinion. I didn’t have power of attorney, so I couldn’t make that decision for my mother. Christmas day arrives, and the doctor shows up really early that morning to patronize my mother and tell her she would be spending Christmas in the hospital which makes her so furious that she becomes quiet for the majority of the day in a state of increased blood pressure.
The following day I make it to the hospital where my sister tells me that her primary pulmonary doctor showed up that day to check on his patients and wonders why she is still in the hospital. We express the same sentiment. He leaves, and a few hours later yet another replacement general practice doctor shows up, different from the two days prior. He says that she has to remain in the hospital and for another week which instantly makes myself and my sister so angry we could spit nails. After he treats us as if we are stupid like the majority of her doctors have I get visions in my head of how to do bodily harm to him, so to keep from punching a hole in his head I storm out of the room and instead punch a hole in the wall of the front lobby’s men’s bathroom. I thought the day before I was angry; that was nothing compared to the state I was in at that point. The anger seemed to radiate from every inch of me, and people moved out of my way as I came barreling down the halls of the hospital. While I was gone my sister vehemently had an argument with the doctor where she picks apart every single reason he has for my mother’s sojourn. As I’m returning to the room I could hear from the other end of the hall their ensuing argument. The nurse’s station is in an uproar over the unexpected ruckus. Being so angry I pretty much ignore their existence and walk down to the room ready to remove the doctor from my mother’s sight personally with the intent of not causing any harm to him in the process as I already releaved my desire to do such on the bathroom wall downstairs. He storms out of the room in anger himself while my sister patronizes him as he runs out the doorway. He looks at me, acts like he wants to say something, and decides not to due to the look upon my face. If he did say something derogatory at that moment I would have made him require a hospital room of his own despite knowing fully the consequences of my actions.
I enter the room where my sister is in a state similar to my own. We calm each other down, and the doctor walks in again. I turn around to look at him ready to intently do what I came back to the room to do in the first place. He instead states that he talked with her pulmonary doctor who states that she should go home or she’ll get worse, and that he wanted to come back to state that he’s going to be signing his part of her release papers in just a moment or two. We don’t say anything, and he leaves. My sister decides to leave the room to cool off some more and meets her cardiologist in the hall who states that he wants to come by to see my mother, so my sister returns to the room. He walks in with a grin on his face and says, “Well, I heard you have been causing a problem.” We ask him where did he get that impression, and he states that he heard it all from the nurses. He calms my mother down telling her that she has nothing to worry about. There’s nothing wrong with her but with some remaining bits of pneumonia, and that she’ll make a full recovery. My mother goes home, and that night we open presents upon her insistence. We were going to postpone it until Sunday. She has a followup appointment next week to another general practice doctor suggested by the cardiologist. All is well.
From this experience I’ve come from it with a very sour view of doctors for the most part. The entire reason why she was in the hospital was due to medical malpractice, and the needless excessive duration of her stay in the hospital was due to such as well. Her prolonged stay was due to her replacement general practice doctors’ indolence because they didn’t want to do the work to sign her out of the hospital. Her pulmonary doctors never performed any form of a respiratory test on her of any kind because they assumed the general practice doctor had done so already despite our telling them she hadn’t had a test, but they did come to their senses after the cardiologist decided to perform one on my mother.
For the most part when someone is handed their medical doctorate degree and gains MD on the end of their name they instantly develop a mental retardation, blindness, and deafness due to their inability to assume that anyone without a doctorate degree in anything has the proper sense to know, say, or see anything. It develops into a sort of god complex where they essentially consider themselves above everyone else. In the United States there aren’t any titles. No one is a queen or king. No one is instantly from birth better than anyone else. Respect is earned and not entitled, not even to doctors. I can say without a shadow of doubt that I’ve lost much of my respect I might have had initially for any doctor, and I can say I have more than an excessive amount of respect for my father’s and now my mother’s cardiologist.
I don’t believe I would have gotten through this without the help of my friends and the continuous show of support from followers on Twitter. Thank you all.