365 Days That Count - Day 44 - I hate hospitals.
I’ve had my fair share of negative experiences with doctors and hospitals and yesterday I had another.
My mum woke up with a nosebleed, but this was no normal nosebleed, blood was literally pouring out of her. By the time I got there her bathroom looked like a crime scene and she was covered in blood.
I took her to the emergency rooms at our local, private and very expensive hospital. By this point she had lost and swallowed so much blood she was green, pale and shaking.
We sat there for over an hour before she was even seen. I tried to tell myself they were busy but I knew from the total lack of urgency as they walked past the waiting room they were not.
Eventually we went in and she was left for another 15 minutes until a nurse came to ask her a list of the most ridiculously irrelevant questions before trying to make her in any way more comfortable. My mum is 61, I think for anyone to have a nosebleed that bad would be disconcerting but by this stage she was quite panicked and their total lack of empathy was shocking.
Then a doctor who looked like he’d graduated last week came in and asked her the same list of irrelevant questions all over again. He appeared rather put off by the amount of blood and hardly touched her.
He left it to the nurse to roughly shove an adrenaline soaked rectangle sponge in each nostril before telling us that would stop the bleeding and leaving the bed. You could tell they hadn’t been inserted nearly high enough and were immediately soaked with blood.
I went and found the doctor and suggested they called the ENT which he agreed to do without even going back to check on her himself.
Another 20 minutes went by before they came back with a balloon which they inserted into her nose and then inflated telling us it would stop the bleeding within 30 minutes. By now she could hardly breathe, they still hadn’t bothered to clean the blood off her face and I was fucking furious.
I’m no doctor but it was clear that the bleeding was not going to stop. I phoned the ENT’s rooms myself only to find out he was in surgery and wouldn’t be able to see her for another 2 hours - if they had called him when we first arrived he could’ve seen her before going in.
The baby doctor then reappeared to tell us she would have to leave the balloon in over night. This sent her into a panic and me into a rage.
I called the ENT’s rooms again and told his receptionist we’d be waiting for him when he got out of surgery.
We’d now been in the hospital for over 4 hours and she was still bleeding. We went home so she could change out of her blood stained clothes and went back to wait for the specialist.
I was literally praying to every spirit I could think of that he'd be able to sort it out, I knew how awful it would have been for her to have that thing in her nose over night.
Eventually we saw him and he contradicted pretty much everything we’d been told up to that point. He also said the first thing they had inserted in her nose was rough and totally the wrong approach which had probably made the whole situation worse.
He removed the balloon, cauterised the bleed and we left.
I haven't been that angry in a long time. I'd watched my mum go through this horrible experience for nearly 8 hours because people are incompetent, because they don't use logic and because they are unequipped and incapable of saying so.
I hate hospitals. Rant over.
I think I need a little meditation :)
Love,
Daisy xx
( @daisyd )
Hello Daisy! Couldn't help but thinking: don't meditate, be angry! I assume that the hospital was very expensive (you said it was private) so surely you are all the more entitled to proper service! If I were you, I wouldn't let them get away with treating your mother so badly! Make a fuss, make them feel your wrath! It's probably the only way things will improve... Your text reminded me of something Bill Mollison wrote in his autobiography:
"'What drives you?' This I find a common question. I guess I do work hard at times. I think they expect that I have got religion, found my vocation. No! Anger drives me. Fury. Not, and never, love or self-sacrifice [...]. The anger is against the stupid way people in power handle problems, like spoilt children, like idiots [...]. We can all see it; we should all be angry, all in action with all our bodies out there [...]. I am furious, and will stay angry while I am alive and I will work at real solutions until I die [...]. And I hope all our kids are angry too; their world is laid waste by fools, for greed or power. Fools [...].
First feel fear
Then get angry
Then go, with your life, into the fight.
Scared, but more angry than scared.
That's it."
I LOVE that quote - thank you so much for sharing. And I agree with you but to a certain extent. Unfortunately I have been through enough bullshit in hospitals to know that it's like banging your head against a brick wall, you sign your life away the second you walk in the door. I contracted a lethal infection in a surgery I only had because they missed a huge internal bleed from the previous operation and still somehow had no leg to stand on legally - utter madness. So in this case, my mum's ok and for my own sanity I'll let it go, but I made my feelings very clear on the day :)
I'm glad you like it! After I posted it I was a little worried you might take to be an insult or a call to violence (which certainly is not what either myself or Bill Mollison are about). I still find it hard ot believe that this can happen in a private hospital: I mean, in a public hospital like the NHS in the UK, I know to expect bad service, total disinterest and lethargy, but it still shocks me that a private hospital can be just as bad. I mean: don't they know they'll lose all their clients/patients if they don't provide a service worth paying for?!
You would think so but sadly in South Africa you are stuck between a rock and a hard place as you wouldn't want to go to a government hospital unless you really had to so the private ones are going to get business regardless as however terrible they are they're still better than the alternative.
No insult or call to violence, promise :)