I'm guessing I kept all these updates bottled inside and everything just keeps building and building and now I'm word vomiting all over blogger. Every time I mean to update I'm just too tired to get log in and type it out. Which I really have no excuse considering it stays logged in on my phone and I'm pretty fast, but I'm faster on a computer, which I do not currently have. I get all psyched up to blog then fall flat. Especially if the idea comes at night because by then I'm all blah.
Anyway. Back to the issue at hand. My papaw is in the hospital. He had been falling quite a bit all of a sudden and that last fall, broke his hip. Again, major fiasco (seems all the hospitals are majorly dropping the ball). The first hospital in Rural City gave him morphine and eventually sent him an hour away to another slightly busy city in neighboring state. En route, his pain meds wear off and the EMTs refuse to give more stating that the hospital will when they get there (which I know they carry it, because they gave my daughter morphine (next blog post) in the ambulance. They get to the next hospital and the staff loses his info packet with his med list etc. They page the surgeon and deny him food/water because obvious but they won't/can't even give him pain meds until a doc signs off. For 2 hours an 82 year old war veteran begs for a cup of water (a total of 12 hours at this point with no fluids) or pain meds while staff claim to be paging the admitting surgeon. The charge nurse comes up with a single dose of morphine to last "until the doctor comes" that she had to "beg for" but still no fluids "because he's having surgery". The surgeon NEVER SHOWS so the call up a regular doctor to order meds and stuff and finally let him eat since it's obvious the surgeon won't show (so that's 4 hospitals locally that surgeons drop the ball here, my local hospital (teeth fiasco circa summer 2014 for SDiva), Rural Hospital #1 (from blog post pending for SDiva summer 2015 - she's trying to hasten my demise), Rural Hospital #2 - same city as #1 - for Papaw, this bigger city hospital (that's FOUR HOSPITALS within 2 hours of each other that dropped the ball). 1 cup of juice and dinner. Then NPO after midnight, for a possible surgery he's not on the books for since the surgeon never showed. And the surgeon whose name is on his chart "we don't have a surgeon here by that name". Um, it's on his chart. We didn't write it. So where did that name come from? Anyway, the next day, he's put on the books for 5 PM. So 24 hours with no fluid except 1 cup of juice, so far, and NPO after midnight, suddenly no morning surgery but since he IS having surgery (that evening) he must remain NPO. One meal and one cup of juice. For 36 hours. Not even fluids by IV. Goes to surgery for a 10 minute procedure, then spends 3 hours in recovery. The nurse has to be tracked down after surgery team sends family back to the orthopedic floor (from surgery waiting) and says he's groggy after the initial hour, so it'll be half an hour to an hour. Then for 2 hours they're waiting on transport. When he FINALLY gets to the floor, the nurse from recovery says the problem was not grogginess, that his oxygen was low and he wouldn't send him nor would a doctor sign off. So which nurse was telling the truth? The ones who didn't do anything right and had to be tracked down for updates? Or the other one. Then as soon as they hook him back up to everything, his blood pressure crashes (68/42 manual). I'm pretty sure I'M not even lucid that low and I'm USED to hypotension. They run blood, lactated ringers and sodium chloride. As soon as I get almost home (45 minutes) my mom texts me that they've called a code c (cardiac team) and that his heart rate is in the low 40s, they're pushing atropine and epinephrine and have the crash cart on stand by, and transfer him to CCU. On an oxygen mask. I drop Big Daddy and the kids off at midnight and head back and stay until 3:30. His sats are still off (the RT switches him to lower oxygen and a smaller mask) but they run blood work to see if he needs more blood and do a chest xray (clear), I head back home when his bp stabilizes. The next day he greatly improves. He is up, eating, talking, basically fine. Granted he's a sick old man, stage 3 kidney disease, hypertension, diabetes, etc but he was his normal self.
They move him BACK to the orthopedic floor, and within 4 hours he's transferred out because his oxygen is back in the mid 80s, he's disoriented, choking on food and combative. That is NOT how he was hours earlier. He was fine in CCU. Now they think he's had a possible stroke and may have pneumonia and a UTI. I know it's supposed to be normal but what the ever loving fuck man.
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