A sad health care story
December 7, 2009Jon Brooks Comments OffIn researching a “health care horror stories” post, I came across one that struck me as especially sad, posted on one of the sites devoted to such material. This had been edited for spelling and grammar.
My mother became dizzy and fell on her kitchen floor. Since her hip was intensely painful, my sister called the paramedics, who took her to the managed care emergency room, where she lay on a gurney in great pain for several hours.
After she was finally examined and had X-Rays taken, she was informed that she had no fractures, just a badly bruised hip. She was told to get out of the bed and go home.
When she told the nurse that she was in too much pain to get out of the bed, she was told that they needed the bed for another patient and she was lifted into a wheelchair during which time she screamed due to the agonizing pain. The nurse told her that she could go home in the wheel chair and to take Tylenol, which would lessen the pain so she could get out of the wheel chair in an hour or so.The Tylenol didn’t help, and my mother spent the night sitting up in the wheel chair. My sister called the HMO to explain that my mother couldn’t get out of the wheel chair even to go to the bathroom. The clerical person that she spoke with told her that a social worker would call her back to help with home care.
Meanwhile, 24 to 48 hours after Bernice left the emergency department, the radiologist, looking at her x-rays, diagnosed her hip as fractured. No one called her at home to tell her this.
A couple of days after she’d fallen, my mother was still unable to get out of the wheel chair, was in great pain, and had to slide forward as much as she could in order to use a bedpan. Since using the bedpan was so painful, she was barely eating or drinking to avoid this.
My sister left another message for the social worker. When I drove out and saw that my mother was still in the same wheel chair, in intense pain, and barely eating or drinking or sleeping, I called the HMO and explained her situation. I was transferred to several different departments and repeated the story to each person I spoke with until finally someone told me to get in touch with her primary care physician.
My mother’s primary care physician was finally summoned to the phone and immediately checked the radiologist’s report of the X-Rays taken in emergency. He learned that the actual diagnosis was a fractured hip and that she never should have been sent home from emergency. He arranged for an ambulance for her and I asked him to arrange to just have her admitted to a hospital room so she wouldn’t have to go through emergency again and was told that this was against procedure.
A second ambulance brought Bernice back to emergency. After about two hours, she was examined again and had to undergo more X-Rays. This process was extremely painful.
The attending physician in emergency explained to me that her hip fracture was now much worse than when she’d initially come in. About an hour later, while still in emergency, the orthopedic surgeon who was assigned to do her hip surgery came to see her.She was not placed in a hospital room until about 3:00 A.M. and was in a room right near the nurses’ station where the telephone kept her up for the rest of the night.
The next day she was taken into surgery. The reparation of her hip took about four hours. She was conscious throughout the surgery because a general anesthesia was not administered due to her age. She had been given a spinal form of anesthesia. She died shortly before the surgery was complete.
