Saturday, December 25, 2004
sick, part two
Please allow me, my dear reader, to preface this by saying that I have had literally about 5 hours of sleep since I woke up Wednesday morning. They tell me it's Saturday night. Eating, sleeping. . . hell, even taking the time to piss, all become secondary and pale in importance when compared to the welfare of your child. You just go, like some sort of parenting auto-pilot just takes over.
So please indulge me any extra ramblings or a more than usual amount of incoherent ranting.
Oh, and Merry Christmas. Or Happy Chrismahanukwanzaakah. Or Happy Festivus, you disappointing piece of crap.
__________
Although he is still a sick little boy, The Boy is home from the hospital.
The doctors never found a definitive cause for his illness or give a definite diagnosis.
Their best guess:
"areas of atelectasis in the right middle and lower left lobes of the lungs caused by a probable viral infection"
Translated into regular guy words:
"a really nasty chest cold"
AAAGGGH! The fucking bastards!
After two days of subjecting The Boy to needles, tubes, wires, and machines that go "ping", after two days of round the clock poking, prodding and examining, after two days of all around hospital bullshit, the best the doctors can do is guess that The Boy has a bad cold!
That is exactly what we told them two fucking days ago when we very reluctantly took him to the emergency room at the advice of the on-call doctor in his pediatrician's office.
Again, I repeat. . . AAAGGGH! The fucking bastards!
They looked at The Boy and saw his symptoms, yes, but the doctors completely 100% disregarded us, the child's parents. They gave little to no credibility to people that have known, loved and cared for The Boy since he was 10 days old, and the knowledge and information we offered to help them accurately diagnose and treat The Boy.
It's inexcusable.
It caused The Boy to be much sicker after a few hours in the ER than he was when we brought him there. It added insult to injury and needlessly induced a tremendous amount of fear, stress, and anxiety in The Boy. It needlessly induced a tremendous amount of fear, stress and anxiety in The Wife, myself, and The Boy's home health nurse slash virtual aunt as we went from wondering what we could do to better treat his cold to literally fearing for his life.
There was a period of time when The Boy's heart rate raced up to between 180 and 190 beats per minute, his respirations were around 80 breathes a minute, and his blood oxygen saturation levels were still down in the 80% range. It became an extremely scary reality that at any moment his heart would literally break from the strain, he would go into cardiac arrest and then well, we didn't think about then, but game over.
It is more a testament to The Boy's strength and tenacity than to the doctor's medical interventions that he is moving nicely down the road to recovery today.
Did I mention it's inexcusable.
And I'll tell one of the reasons why they did it.
Her. It all goes back to her.
The Boy has been seen and treated by numerous doctors at various clinics in this hospital his entire life. He has had surgery there. He has been hospitalized there on three or four ocassions prior for illnesses. In his three short years, if you combine the hospital records with the doctor's records, The Boy has a case file at this hospital that is really a rather impressive collection of documents to behold. We have a copy. It's six to eight inches tall.
And it's full of shit.
Everytime Ms. von Munchausen took The Boy into the hospital for any reason, she lied, exaggerated, or outright made shit up about The Boy. She made it up. The doctors and nurses wrote it down, and now it is part of his medical history.
So now shift your thinking to that of a doctor. What's the very first thing you do before you say or do anything to a patient? Is it accurately assessing a patient's needs so that the best course of action can be determined? No. We live in a litigious age. The very first thing you must do is ask yourself, "How will this sound in a courtroom?"
With that in mind, what would you have done if you were the ER doctors treating The Boy on Thursday? On what information would you base your decisions? What you were being told by the child's newly adopted parents, or what you read in three years of case history?
Her abuse and neglect of The Boy will haunt him forever.
__________
But the good news is The Boy is home and sleeping comfortably. As is The Wife. As I will be doing very very soon.
And well, The Boy has a bad cold. So we'll spend the next few days to a week or so being the parents of a child with a cold. Treating The Boy is slightly more complicated. We have machines that go ping and buzz. But still, you basically treat the symptoms, make sure that he's comfortable, gets plenty of fluids and lots of rest.
At some future time I will share more of this tale, including details of my turn spending last night in the hospital with The Boy and all the frightening things you hear in the wee hours.
"Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night"
|
So please indulge me any extra ramblings or a more than usual amount of incoherent ranting.
Oh, and Merry Christmas. Or Happy Chrismahanukwanzaakah. Or Happy Festivus, you disappointing piece of crap.
__________
Although he is still a sick little boy, The Boy is home from the hospital.
The doctors never found a definitive cause for his illness or give a definite diagnosis.
Their best guess:
"areas of atelectasis in the right middle and lower left lobes of the lungs caused by a probable viral infection"
Translated into regular guy words:
"a really nasty chest cold"
AAAGGGH! The fucking bastards!
After two days of subjecting The Boy to needles, tubes, wires, and machines that go "ping", after two days of round the clock poking, prodding and examining, after two days of all around hospital bullshit, the best the doctors can do is guess that The Boy has a bad cold!
That is exactly what we told them two fucking days ago when we very reluctantly took him to the emergency room at the advice of the on-call doctor in his pediatrician's office.
Again, I repeat. . . AAAGGGH! The fucking bastards!
They looked at The Boy and saw his symptoms, yes, but the doctors completely 100% disregarded us, the child's parents. They gave little to no credibility to people that have known, loved and cared for The Boy since he was 10 days old, and the knowledge and information we offered to help them accurately diagnose and treat The Boy.
It's inexcusable.
It caused The Boy to be much sicker after a few hours in the ER than he was when we brought him there. It added insult to injury and needlessly induced a tremendous amount of fear, stress, and anxiety in The Boy. It needlessly induced a tremendous amount of fear, stress and anxiety in The Wife, myself, and The Boy's home health nurse slash virtual aunt as we went from wondering what we could do to better treat his cold to literally fearing for his life.
There was a period of time when The Boy's heart rate raced up to between 180 and 190 beats per minute, his respirations were around 80 breathes a minute, and his blood oxygen saturation levels were still down in the 80% range. It became an extremely scary reality that at any moment his heart would literally break from the strain, he would go into cardiac arrest and then well, we didn't think about then, but game over.
It is more a testament to The Boy's strength and tenacity than to the doctor's medical interventions that he is moving nicely down the road to recovery today.
Did I mention it's inexcusable.
And I'll tell one of the reasons why they did it.
Her. It all goes back to her.
The Boy has been seen and treated by numerous doctors at various clinics in this hospital his entire life. He has had surgery there. He has been hospitalized there on three or four ocassions prior for illnesses. In his three short years, if you combine the hospital records with the doctor's records, The Boy has a case file at this hospital that is really a rather impressive collection of documents to behold. We have a copy. It's six to eight inches tall.
And it's full of shit.
Everytime Ms. von Munchausen took The Boy into the hospital for any reason, she lied, exaggerated, or outright made shit up about The Boy. She made it up. The doctors and nurses wrote it down, and now it is part of his medical history.
So now shift your thinking to that of a doctor. What's the very first thing you do before you say or do anything to a patient? Is it accurately assessing a patient's needs so that the best course of action can be determined? No. We live in a litigious age. The very first thing you must do is ask yourself, "How will this sound in a courtroom?"
With that in mind, what would you have done if you were the ER doctors treating The Boy on Thursday? On what information would you base your decisions? What you were being told by the child's newly adopted parents, or what you read in three years of case history?
Her abuse and neglect of The Boy will haunt him forever.
__________
But the good news is The Boy is home and sleeping comfortably. As is The Wife. As I will be doing very very soon.
And well, The Boy has a bad cold. So we'll spend the next few days to a week or so being the parents of a child with a cold. Treating The Boy is slightly more complicated. We have machines that go ping and buzz. But still, you basically treat the symptoms, make sure that he's comfortable, gets plenty of fluids and lots of rest.
At some future time I will share more of this tale, including details of my turn spending last night in the hospital with The Boy and all the frightening things you hear in the wee hours.
"Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night"
|
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