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Mar. 14th, 2007 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fredericksA weird couple of days I've had (/Yoda). Sorry; my default thought mode is sentence fragments, so I end up tacking on subject and verb at the end of things. I worked Sunday night into Monday morning. Got in around 11AM on Monday, slept three hours, went out to Midtown. Tuesday I got another four hours of sleep before schlepping over to Midtown again to get a Wii, came back home to cook dinner, then went *back* out there again to see "300" (my mini opinion - it was okay. I expected more actual, you know, story. I was annoyed with everything surrounding Leonidas's wife. Xerxes cracked my shit up - dude is really into the sub scene, isn't he? Very pretty overall, though, particularly on that huge screen), and came home to find out Dad had another seizure and was in the hospital. I had time to grab a quick nap before going to see him in the ER with my mom.
Here's the thing: now that I work in a hospital - I work, in fact, in a sister hospital to the one my dad went to (I originally wanted to work in that hospital because it was the one dad frequents but there were no openings on the med-surg or neuro floors when I applied)- I more or less know what goes down. I know the ER in this hospital is often overcrowded, but I also know that some of the delay in processing cases is due to human error. All told my father was in the ER for 11 hours, five of those hours hooked up to a cardiac monitor. See, they'd done a routine EKG on him and found atrial fibrillation (translation: a period of pacemaker/heart rhythm malfunction). That's abnormal and, as far as I know, you're supposed to notify an MD and do an immediate repeat EKG or hook the patient up to a monitor and notify an MD. Which is why I'm wondering why the MD was completely in the dark about the period of a-fib until he pulled out dad's chart when he came to see him some four hours after his entry into the ER. The more I think about it the more riled I become. No repeat EKG was done, and sure dad's vitals were otherwise stable but no repeat EKG was done. Until, of course, the MD saw the a-fib strip and ordered another EKG to be done. Again, this was at least four hours after the first one had been completed.
I'm getting distracted (mentally). Okay, so dad went to the ER post-seizure (have I mentioned the man has not been taking his anticonvulsant medication? have I mentioned how fucking angry I was at him yesterday? how angry I am now?) and showed a-fib. Intermittent, which is why they ended up admitting him to a telemetry unit. Course, we didn't get up to the floor until 5AM. My father was taken to the hospital at 6PM (I also didn't mention it took EMTs 20 minutes to get to our house, did I?). And then the lovely nurses from the ER stuck my father in an all-female room on the tele floor, meaning he had to hang out in the hallway waiting for a discharge from a male room. Meaning physicians couldn't see him until after he was in a room. Meaning he's spending extra time in the hospital (something else I forgot to mention - the ER doc forgot to hand dad's paperwork over to the appropriate ER nurse, which contributed to his length of stay in the ER).
Good things about knowing what was happening: at the time I didn't let the human error side of our ER debacle anger me too much. Even now I'm not angry so much as frustrated by the whole thing. Being there during the bulk of dad's ER time was good, as I got the doctors to explain everything they thought and/or planned on doing, instead of allowing them to lapse into slightly misleading layman-ese. Initially dad wanted to leave...in fact, when mom took me to the hospital it was to talk him into staying. Oh, I was angry then. At him, for failing to take him medication (the only positive - by abstaining from his medication he's saved his liver from overload due to an alcohol/med mix). I let it all show. Apparently it worked.
Mom told me the cardiologist saw dad today and said there'd been no further periods of a-fib since he entered tele. That's a good thing, but it has me wondering if he doesn't just go into periods of a-fib after seizure activity. It would mean it'd be doubly important that he take his seizure meds in a consistent fashion and it would probably call for him to take aspirin on a regular basis, aspirin or coumadin, and I'm hoping they wouldn't stick him on coumadin. Other than that his late admission and all the moving around on the floor meant he didn't go for the echocardiogram. Hopefully when I see him tomorrow before I go to work (and I'm so frackin' tired right now - I didn't get home until 9 this morning - thinking about going to work tomorrow makes me want to curl up into a ball) I'll be able to catch a couple of physicians and ask them what's going on.
Just a small note - please, no words of sympathy or condolence. I assume you wonderful folks on my FL care, which is part of the reason why I'm allowing myself to vent here. I just don't take well to those at the best of times.
Here's the thing: now that I work in a hospital - I work, in fact, in a sister hospital to the one my dad went to (I originally wanted to work in that hospital because it was the one dad frequents but there were no openings on the med-surg or neuro floors when I applied)- I more or less know what goes down. I know the ER in this hospital is often overcrowded, but I also know that some of the delay in processing cases is due to human error. All told my father was in the ER for 11 hours, five of those hours hooked up to a cardiac monitor. See, they'd done a routine EKG on him and found atrial fibrillation (translation: a period of pacemaker/heart rhythm malfunction). That's abnormal and, as far as I know, you're supposed to notify an MD and do an immediate repeat EKG or hook the patient up to a monitor and notify an MD. Which is why I'm wondering why the MD was completely in the dark about the period of a-fib until he pulled out dad's chart when he came to see him some four hours after his entry into the ER. The more I think about it the more riled I become. No repeat EKG was done, and sure dad's vitals were otherwise stable but no repeat EKG was done. Until, of course, the MD saw the a-fib strip and ordered another EKG to be done. Again, this was at least four hours after the first one had been completed.
I'm getting distracted (mentally). Okay, so dad went to the ER post-seizure (have I mentioned the man has not been taking his anticonvulsant medication? have I mentioned how fucking angry I was at him yesterday? how angry I am now?) and showed a-fib. Intermittent, which is why they ended up admitting him to a telemetry unit. Course, we didn't get up to the floor until 5AM. My father was taken to the hospital at 6PM (I also didn't mention it took EMTs 20 minutes to get to our house, did I?). And then the lovely nurses from the ER stuck my father in an all-female room on the tele floor, meaning he had to hang out in the hallway waiting for a discharge from a male room. Meaning physicians couldn't see him until after he was in a room. Meaning he's spending extra time in the hospital (something else I forgot to mention - the ER doc forgot to hand dad's paperwork over to the appropriate ER nurse, which contributed to his length of stay in the ER).
Good things about knowing what was happening: at the time I didn't let the human error side of our ER debacle anger me too much. Even now I'm not angry so much as frustrated by the whole thing. Being there during the bulk of dad's ER time was good, as I got the doctors to explain everything they thought and/or planned on doing, instead of allowing them to lapse into slightly misleading layman-ese. Initially dad wanted to leave...in fact, when mom took me to the hospital it was to talk him into staying. Oh, I was angry then. At him, for failing to take him medication (the only positive - by abstaining from his medication he's saved his liver from overload due to an alcohol/med mix). I let it all show. Apparently it worked.
Mom told me the cardiologist saw dad today and said there'd been no further periods of a-fib since he entered tele. That's a good thing, but it has me wondering if he doesn't just go into periods of a-fib after seizure activity. It would mean it'd be doubly important that he take his seizure meds in a consistent fashion and it would probably call for him to take aspirin on a regular basis, aspirin or coumadin, and I'm hoping they wouldn't stick him on coumadin. Other than that his late admission and all the moving around on the floor meant he didn't go for the echocardiogram. Hopefully when I see him tomorrow before I go to work (and I'm so frackin' tired right now - I didn't get home until 9 this morning - thinking about going to work tomorrow makes me want to curl up into a ball) I'll be able to catch a couple of physicians and ask them what's going on.
Just a small note - please, no words of sympathy or condolence. I assume you wonderful folks on my FL care, which is part of the reason why I'm allowing myself to vent here. I just don't take well to those at the best of times.
