Slipping through the Cracks in the World of Fast Food Healthcare - Part 4
Note: This post is a continuation from Parts 1-3 of the same title. I will try to make this post as stand alone as possible, but it will make more sense if you read the other posts first. This is a true story of a medical odyssey that serves as a reminder that mistakes are made and sometimes you need to be your own advocate and not blindly trust any doctor when it comes to your health and well being. Knowledge is power and a little skepticism could save your life.
When we left off, I had made the decision to go to the ER. It was just after lunch when we arrived and I was able to get into an ER room within a half hour or so. My parents waited with me because it takes the ER a long time to run tests on you and make a decision to admit you. It was around 7 hours later when they decided to admit me. The ER doctor also determined, incorrectly, that apparently I had Shingles. The doctor based this on the face that my pain was on one side, and that he thought I had a rash . The rash was actually my fingernail marks from me gripping my side in pain (Similar to the man in the picture on this post) because compression made it feel slightly better.
The hospital kept me in for 4 days. While I was in there, I had blood drawn about 8 times in the first day and about 3-4 times a day each day after that. One arm had an IV, so they always draw from the non-IV arm. You can only imagine what my arm looked like after having blood drawn that many times in a short time span.
It was the first time in my life that I've ever had to stay overnight in a hospital - let alone three nights and most of another day. Hospital life is frightening. Nearly everyone that comes into your room is going to stick you with a needle, take you off to some unpleasant testing, or bring you food that you are unable to identify by sight or taste. There was a frail elderly woman that had been taken into the room next to me. I had seen her on a gurney outside the room waiting to be wheeled off to some fun-filled testing when I was first taken to my room. I'm pretty sure she died that night as I woke to an alarm, urgent announcements for code blue, and frantic commotion out in the hall.
By the third day, little had been done to diagnose my issues. This hospital's idea of resolving my symptoms aside from pain medication on demand in the form of Oxycontin. The funny thing was that the pain medication took the edge off the pain, but did not make me feel much better at all. Something was still very wrong.
Because my gastroenterologist has practicing rights at that hospital, he sent over another doctor from his practice to perform a colonoscopy. Because I had not had time to do the usual prep, I was given a hot water enema, which I can only describe as one of the single worst experiences of my life, which was made a million times worse by the fact that I am female and the enema was given by a male nurse who expected me to "let it out" into a bed pan in front of him. I ground my teeth against the pain and insisted on using the bathroom (on my own). He told me to be sure not to flush as he needed to look at it. Joy!
At any rate, this hospital determined that the C. Difficile infection was gone based on the fact that the doctor doing the colonoscopy did not see any bacterial colonies (what an icky term). I was promptly cut off the antibiotics used to treat the infection (which turned out to be a huge mistake based on the very high reinfection rate). The hospital had also put me on a steroid(Prednisone) which is often used to treat a wide variety of inflammation in the body.
On the fourth day, the hospital released me with a prescription for the steroid that was good for exactly one week with no taper. Incidentally, you're not supposed to just stop taking Prednisone - It's dangerous. They also gave me a narcotic painkiller (Oxycontin) which did very little to really help my pain and is addictive! It also didn't help the fact that I was still having issues breathing.
Hours before I was released, the doctor did a chest x-ray and a knee x-ray (as my right knee still intermittently had a very slight pain from swelling). They said everything looked good and diagnosed me with costochondritis https://www.healthline.com/health/costochondritis, which is just a fancy name for inflammation of the tissue and cartilage around the rib cage.
They surmised that my intestine was still inflamed due to the ulcerative colitis being active due to C. Difficile irritation and that basically my sigmoid colon was bumping into my diaphragm muscle when I moved wrong or took a deep breath, which caused a painful spasm and the feeling of the wind being knocked out of me.
I felt much better for the first couple days that I was home. By the third day, I started getting the stabbing pains back again, although not as bad as they were. This was the week of Thanksgiving. I felt that after having been diagnosed and treated at the hospital, that things would continue to get better, but I was very wrong.
Within weeks, I would learn that even hospitals are not always right and that in this world of fast food healthcare and possibly pressure from the insurance companies to get people out as soon as possible, patients often get the short end of the stick, sometimes with life-threatening effects.
I will talk about the final leg of this medical Odyssey in Part 5.
It’s always made me curious how 2 different doctors can diagnose a patient with 2 different diagnosis, or one will miss something completely. It’s usually good to get a second opinion.
This is so true. In the hospital, I actually had several doctors visit me daily. I had no idea why or who they were. Most of them were specialists and to make it more confusing, some days a different doctor would be covering the specialty because the other doctor was not in. So it was not unusual to see say 2-3 different doctors for the same specialty if you were in the hospital more than a few days.