Re: LTE 2.0
Posted: April 3rd, 2014, 5:19 pm
Please push for a transfer to Duke. Raise holy hell and don't shut up. Call their risk management and scream. This sucks.lawgrad91 wrote:Ok, we are home, and the story goes something like this.lawgrad91 wrote:Big time vibes and prayers for Christian, again. He is in CCU at the sucky Martinsville Hospital with 2 pulmonary embolisms. When I am on my iPad or computer (I am on the phone currently, I will detail this new round of incompetence.
Christian has been at Stanleytown Health Care Center. If you recall, insurance thought he was well enough to be living independently with just therapy and maybe a little in home assistance. When my friend Sandy went by on Sunday, he was tired and was having some trouble breathing. (Bear in mind that he has had ZERO trouble breathing before that time.) His blood oxygen level was in the 80's. so they put him on oxygen, but apparently that was the extent of their checking on any breathing issue. He was still on oxygen on Tuesday, but nonetheless the plan was to release him on Wednesday to Blue Ridge Nursing Center, which allegedly has an assisted living section. (Stanleytown is considered the "good" nursing home, allegedly several cuts above Blue Ridge.) So yesterday when I was with Mom, I get a call from the intake lady at Blue Ridge. It was about 2 in the afternoon. She said she didn't know where Christian was and he was supposed to have been there by 10, but it was her understanding his sister was going to take him by the hospital first.I gave her his sister's phone number and told her I have no clue what is going on, that I was trying to get my Mom's knee surgery issues squared away.
I'm not too clear on if Stanleytown suggested to Edie that she take Christian to the ER, or if she decided that on her own, but she took him to the Martinsville Hospital ER (no doubt to end up sitting in the waiting room with all the people in town who go to the ER every time they have a cough, as opposed to being brought over by ambulance where the patient goes to the head of the class. But at least she knew there was a problem.) At any rate, she took him there, and someone determined that he had two pulmonary embolisms, so they sent him to a unit, never bothering to hook him up to any monitors. The RN on duty in that unit had a cow when he arrived and she looked at his chart. She said he needed specialized supervision and her unit wasn't capable of that. The hospital administration said so sorry, the Cardiac Care doesn't have bed space for him, he'll have to stay. So he stayed, until Sandy (who used to work at the hospital, in Human Resources) called in some favors and they found him a bed in Cardiac Care.
The last I heard from anyone, we was "doing well" there and was going to have another swallow test today. I'm not exactly sure why they are doing a swallow test on him right now, with a problem that could break loose and kill him at any time, but this is the hospital that had a guy who was drunk and also had a ruptured spleen die because they didn't bother to check any of his blood counts for the three days that he was there, assuming that he was just another drunk. And the same hospital that expected my then-husband, Oedipus, to walk nearly half a mile to the car after arthroscopic knee surgery because they didn't have a wheelchair available, after they removed him from short stay and put him in a room without notifying any staff on that floor and the nurse threatened to charge us with trespassing because she didn't know why we were there. (I guess the guy in the hospital gown in the bed, with his knee wrapped in bandages, wasn't much of a clue.) And that's just the tip of the iceberg of horror stories about this place.
To top it all off, his new "primary care physician" is an orthopedic surgeon. The only thing he knows about lungs is that on the female persuasion, they are located behind the boobs.
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. You guys give the best vibes and hugs.
