| 8130JD - 5/23/2023 16:35
You are your mothers advocate.
There's a lot of truth in this. Mistakes happen and sometimes it's more often than anyone wants to admit. My wife spent a week in the hospital when her previously diagnosed, but untreated hydrocephalus finally caused problems. I was pretty amazed at how a shift change was like playing a game of Telephone. Every change the story of the patient changed every so slightly and details were lost. Other than giving myself ten hours to sleep every two days I was there 24/7 taking notes and keeping things in check. My wife was on so much morphine to keep her pain at bay while she stabilized that she was in no condition to keep things in line.
I finally had to be That Guy at one point. They put a temporary drain in my wife's head to get her to stabilize so she had this drain tube leaving from a hole in her skull to a elevated drip tube that was there to maintain a few inches of pressure in her cranium. Every hour they would close off a valve to a pressure sensor, open another valve so it was vented to atmosphere, tared it, then reverted the valves and would take a pressure reading. After a shift change the new nurse was opening the valve to atmosphere first which would dump all the pressure in my wife's head and instantly give her a migraine. Meanwhile cranial fluid is leaking out of this valve which should have been a pretty big warning sign. It's been a while and I can't recall all the details, but ultimately the nurse would get a negative pressure reading and just carry on. No thought put into what she was seeing.
After the third time I finally had to call her out on it and of course there was a disagreement; it's only natural. She brought in another nurse who also disagreed (despite being the one who had been doing this properly before). I was tired and impatient and trying my best to be calm, but man was that hard. I finally pointed out that they should never be getting a negative pressure and they're literally just dumping cranial fluid out on the floor. Of course being an engineer I knew they were wrong about this (it's practically fluids/hydraulics 101), but couldn't for the life of me explain why in a clear fashion. Long story short it got all cleared up and my wife thought I was a dick. lol |
My mom is in hospice at nursing home. No meds
