The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

But since I don’t want to end this saga on a down note, I’d like to point out that it all worked out in end, and if even one of the lessons I learned from my time in the hospital helps someone else down the line, well . . . it won’t necessarily make it all worthwhile, but it’s a step in the right direction, at least. With that in mind, here’s one more thing I learned:

When you call and tell someone you need help “cleaning something up,” the look of joy on their face is palpable when they realize you’ve shaved your head in the shower, but you’re not flexible enough yet to bend down and clean up the hair.

“Sorry,” I told them.

“Don’t be!” the assistant assured me. “Do you have any idea what ‘help cleaning something up’ usually means for me?”

Chuckling, I replied, “Actually, I do have some idea, yeah, and that’s half the reason I phrased it the way I did. That’s what I’m sorry about, but I do also appreciate the help with the hair.”

What can I say? Sometimes you just have to take your chuckles where you can . . . especially in a hospital, and with that said, this saga is done!

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

At that point I was too far gone to even be angry (which says something about my state), so I personally defined “soon” as “they have five minutes before I press the pain call button again and start getting obnoxious if I have to.” Ten minutes or so after pressing the button a second time, someone came in to actually help me, and I didn’t even have to be obnoxious about it. I did get a little angry later, of course, but I honestly had no idea who came in and turned off the alarm beyond it was someone I didn’t know (again, saying something about my state), so there really wasn’t anything I could do.

I almost forgot about it, truth be told, until later on when I had a much less dire need for pain medication, and another member of staff I didn’t recognize came in and helped me.

“Doesn’t the nurse assigned to me have to be the one to give me medication?” I asked her.

“Not for pain medication,” she told me. “Any nurse on the floor can do that, and I saw your light was on. For obvious reasons we’re not supposed to ignore those.”

“So . . .” I said slowly, “Why would a nurse come in and turn off the alarm and leave then?”

She looked horrified. “Did that happen to you?” she asked. “Do you know who did it?”

Now a lot angry in hindsight, I replied, “I really, really wish I did!”

Some resolutions in life feel more like resignations, and this was one of those for me. I learned something valuable, and I hope to never have to need this knowledge again, but if I do . . .

Suffice it to say that I shall apply this knowledge with gusto.

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

So they’d just installed a PICC line in me, which the paperwork made sound terrifying, but it wasn’t that bad for me in practice, then about five minutes later they did yet another clamping procedure. Since I was in some pain (around a 3 out of 10), I figured I’d go ahead and ask for some Tylenol since I had them there, and I knew the clamping would only increase that pain over time.

So far so good.

Obviously you have to give pain medication a chance to work, so I did just that, and it was a little over thirty minutes later that I realized my pain was increasing, not decreasing. As you might recall, being at a 5 out of 10 isn’t an ideal level to start reporting pain, but it was what it was, and it was nobody’s fault, so I dutifully pressed the “pain” call button and waited.

And waited, and waited, and waited.

I can’t tell you for sure exactly how long I waited because my pain kept increasing and my ability to focus on things like clocks and time kept decreasing. Even so, it was after about 45 minutes or so and an uncertain number of remote assurances that someone would be with me “soon,” that someone finally came in. (I should clarify here that I wasn’t calling repeatedly; once that pain call button was pressed it literally could not be turned off except by a member of staff physically coming into the room.) I was at a 7 out of 10 at that point, my eyes were crossing every time I tried to look at the clock and I was privately asking myself if I was underreporting my pain level out of excessive pride, so I was very happy to see this person!

For all of three seconds before they turned off the alarm, assured me someone would be with me “soon,” and walked out of the room.

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

So the fast forward version of how the important issues were resolved is as follows:

The seven-minute secret police style room relocation: “Yeah, that shouldn’t have happened. Sorry.” (With a side of speculation that somebody probably felt they needed that room stat, but it was still inappropriate.)

The apple slices: “That definitely shouldn’t have happened!” (The allergen was flagged, but not highlighted in their system, so it was printed unobtrusively at the bottom of the printout, and their final line of defense (i.e., the person who actually handed me the tray) missed it. The real problem, the lack of highlighting, was corrected and several people became more aware of potential future problems.)

The surprise procedure: “Wow . . . um . . . really? That’s . . . not good.” (While it was a legitimate misunderstanding on the doctor’s part who I believe genuinely believed I knew what she was about to do, this is a big hospital no-no, and valuable lessons were learned on both sides. The doctor learned to communicate better (and we actually got along great after this happened), and I learned that so long as I’m conscious and lucid, nobody touches me in the hospital until they’ve explained what they’re there for.)

The leak: “Okay . . . we’re all good now. Thanks for alerting us.” (I simply can’t stress enough the importance of speaking up as necessary in the hospital.)

The unanswered questions: “Thank you for calling, how may I help you?” (Here, at least, patients have the right to have their questions answered, and a phone call and a couple of face-to-face meetings did the trick, though I still have no idea why this particular nurse was so profoundly unhelpful. She was not the norm!)

The one I haven’t talked about yet: I’ll talk about this tomorrow. (But speaking of “not the norm” . . .)

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

So with that perspective in mind, I was able to laugh off the trifles like it once took hours and my dad physically walking to the desk to get a fresh box of tissues. I don’t pretend I laughed at the things that did no lasting harm, but hurt like Hell, like the time I realized I had about thirty more minutes of sitting up in me before I’d need help getting back to bed, pressed the call button at that precise moment, and an hour later the patient care assistant (who was unable to move me herself) went above and beyond the call of duty by grabbing the head nurse in a rare moment of freedom between crises, or the prolonged wait in an uncomfortable wheelchair for the MRI to be available, but so long as the reason was somebody else was in more immediate need than I, I was fine with it. (Well, I was when the hurting stopped, at least.)

Besides, I had to reserve my ire for the things that really mattered, and I’m happy to say that most of those things were resolved to my satisfaction. (You may notice a pattern that, generally speaking, all that required was an acknowledgement that it shouldn’t have happened, ideally with a side of “and here’s how we’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again, but I’ll have to go over those resolutions tomorrow because today I’m focusing on hopefully resolving the matter of a medical order that is missing from my home health care service’s records, but that everyone else involved seems to agree that it exists.)

(No, it really doesn’t ever end.)

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

My point is things went wrong when I was in the hospital, a lot of things. Some were minor and some were . . . less minor, but they all pretty much had one thing in common (besides the obvious that, ideally, they shouldn’t have happened in the first place): They seemed to be a predictable result of a system that was consistently asking more of its people than the people were capable of giving despite giving their best. This is the proverbial “not good,” not good for the patients, not good for the hospital staff, not good for anybody, but fortunately there’s an easy and inexpensive solution.

Did you believe me when I said that? I hope not, because there is no such solution! (But if you happen to have such a solution anyway, don’t wait for my permission to start implementing it! Just tell me how it went in about a year or so because I’m still recovering and have a lot of ground to catch up on for the foreseeable future.)

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

Even when my patience was exhausted (usually because I was exhausted), I could at least remain understanding because I could see the signs of overload in the staff everywhere I looked. “Overworked and understaffed” doesn’t even begin to convey what I could tell they were going through, and that’s before I factored in the difficulties of working with the hospital bureaucracy. (Like the time a nurse was delayed thirty minutes when she was supposed to be “right back” because her supervisor caught her in the hall and needed a full report on something that could not be delayed even five minutes.)

I quickly learned that understanding worked best when it was a two-way street though, and it generally was. It was a member of the staff who told me, “I appreciate the understanding, but you also need and deserve your needs to be taken care of, so speak up as often as you need to.” And she was right, of course.

So that’s how I learned to ask for things before I needed them whenever possible (like to start asking for pain medication at no later than a 3 out of 10 pain level, for instance, because it’ll be higher before anybody will be able to get anything to you), to be polite in reminders like, “The IV alarm has been going off for fifteen minutes now,” and to actually give them time to do something about it before giving another reminder. (But to also feel no guilt if I deemed another reminder necessary, because I also learned in a highway filled with squeaky wheels, the silent wheel will not be noticed.)

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

It was only after writing yesterday’s entry that I realized that the total number of notable unfortunate incidents during my hospital stay (including the one that I’ll mention eventually) means that I experienced, on average, approximately one such incident for every two days of my total stay. Though this number does not include any of the incidents that were regular enough to have given birth to my tongue-in-cheek “seven to ten business days” timeframe for expecting a meaningful response to pressing the call button, those collective incidents are what I want to address first because I think that will help put the more serious incidents into proper perspective.

Let me make this clear, I was in a good hospital, and with very few exceptions, I feel the entire staff there was caring and doing their absolute best.

They were also working under hellacious conditions that astonished me. Maybe not quite M*A*S*H level in the sense there were no bullets or bombs, but the constant, and I mean constant alerts and alarms became maddening to me, and I was only there two weeks, didn’t have a pager feeding them to me, and wasn’t expected to answer any of them in any event. Of course the staff tuned them out as much as they could, they had to for their own sanity so they could focus on the crisis before them at any given moment, and I did my best to be patient and understanding of that. Being patient is easy when you have the luxury of knowing what you need in advance enough to account for the delay time, but when your IV alarm has been going off in your ear for twenty minutes for the umpteenth time because your IV is done, nobody is available to turn it off and disconnect you, and you have just been assured once again that someone will be with you “soon,” it’s hard for a patient to be patient.

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

It became important after I came back from an exhausting procedure and had just slipped into bed vowing not to move again for the rest of the night, when a nurse came in like the secret police moving me to a location that no one would ever hear from me again. My belongings were gathered in a heartbeat, I was put in a wheelchair and rapidly moved down the hallway, with effort I managed to text my family my supposed new room number while in the elevator, and then I was in a new bed.

Total elapsed time start to finish, I’d say about seven minutes, and that incident is how I (and my advocate) met the floor manager the next day for a WTF? meeting.

It became important when my breakfast was completely wrong, which would have been a nice change of pace except for the apple slices, which I knew not to eat, but the serving of a flagged allergen to a patient was something that still needed to be addressed if only to save somebody else some hassle down the line.

It became important when a doctor (guess which one) injected me and began another clamping procedure without telling me that’s what she was doing. “Mr. Alan, could you come over here for a moment?” does not tell me, “I’m about to start another unpleasant round of clamping that will make your day Hell and mean you’ll be woken up in the wee hours again.”

It became important when my drainage tube developed a leak, and I didn’t have time for the standard “seven to ten business days” wait for someone to respond to the call button beyond “someone will be there ‘soon,'” and I sent Mom (my advocate of the day at the time) to “physically grab someone if you have to because this just can’t be good.” (That one went from polite humoring to four staff members, including the head nurse, monitoring my vitals and working to repair that tube in no small part because when I say “drainage tube,” I mean something that was hooked up to suction to make that happen.)

It became important on my last day there when a nurse inexplicably told me none of my questions about the status of my release could be answered, especially the ones involving the antibiotics that everybody else seemed to think were pretty important.

You get the idea.

The Hosptial Saga (Part ? of ?)

(Since I’ve been telling this tale for longer than the time I was actually in the hospital, I’m going to start fast forwarding from this point on.)

Obviously an advocate isn’t going to be with you all the time during a hospital stay, but nevertheless I found an advocate (my dad, at first, because, fortunately for me, he was available) to be invaluable. Dad would ask questions I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of myself, and I always feel people try a little harder if they know there’s someone else out there ready to ask questions. With one exception (guess who), the hospital staff seemed happy I had someone in my corner even when they weren’t necessarily always delighted at my dad’s questions.

The one exception (and to be fair, I have my doubts she even considered this rude), fixed my dad with a stare and asked him in a tone that I took be insulting, “And do you have a medical background?”

“No,” I answered for him in Arctic tones. “But he knows lots of people.” (He really does.)

I’ll concede there might have been a better way for me to handle that (no matter how satisfying it was), but I had the energy to give that kind of pushback in the first place because I had an advocate, and, yeah, that all too quickly became important.