02-09-2015, 12:34 PM
I’m a bit loathe to share this story. Maybe I’ve finally found something just a bit too personal. But there has been lots of sharing about the travails of our parents, my own included, but this one seemed a bit too serious. So I kept it to myself over the last two weeks.
But it was such a bad experience, I felt the need to keep some record of it. Maybe you will see this story in a lawsuit someday or on an op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury. So, here we go.
Two weeks ago on Monday January 28th, my sister Roberta called to inform me that my father had gone to the San Jose Kaiser Emergency. He’d spent Sunday night in agony trying and failing to urinate.
Failing to urinate is especially problematic since my father takes Lasik, a drug designed to remove water from your body. Basically, he goes to the bathroom about every 30 minutes. The idea of him not being able to go was especially chilling.
The Kaiser Doctors diagnosed him with a urinary tract infection. They treated him by installing a catheter and giving him antibiotics. On the phone later, I joked with him that he caught it from my mother, the joke being that my mother is in a constant state of urinary tract infection. My mother had to explain to me that is not how people get urinary tract infections when she heard me.
The catheter was quite painful for my father. He complained that they weren’t giving him enough pain meds to help him. Now, the Lynch pain threshold is quite high so the fact my dad was complaining about pain was a bit of a shocker. The plan was for him to have the catheter in for a week.
On Thursday, I get another call from Roberta. My father has gone back to the hospital. On Wednesday, he called Roberta to the house because he started to slur his speech. He was afraid he was in the midst of a stroke.
I didn’t realize it, but there is a stroke test you can give people. She did this and he seemed to be okay. She called 911 anyway. The operator asked her to give my father the stroke test again.
Well they bundled him up and took him back to Kaiser. The diagnosis this time was that a piece of plaque from his Carotid artery might have broken off and gone to his brain. But the MRI or CAT was inconclusive. They wanted to do surgery but they wouldn’t be able to get to him until the weekend, so they sent him home.
Late Thursday, I get a call from my mother. The hospital wants my father back. I guess they figured it didn’t make a lot of sense for him to be sitting at home with a potentially life threatening problem when he could be monitored in the hospital. My mother didn’t like the idea of him having surgery.
My mother has a long standing phobia about surgery. When she was young, a relative died on the operating table. In her mind, everyone who goes under anesthesia is just going to die. This is why she has never had the surgeries to make her life more comfortable and alleviate the pain from her ailments.
I had to yell at my mom because she didn’t want to take my father back. I told her she was irrational about her phobia and I didn’t want to let her fear interfere with my father’s care. There was a lot of angry silence on the phone from my mother’s end as she hung up.
My father went back into the hospital on Friday. He was going to have surgery on either Saturday or Sunday. Tests had revealed that he had 70% blockage in his right Carotid. The vascular surgeons were going to go in and open the blocked artery.
My sister Stephanie opted to fly down on Saturday to be with him. Stephanie has been a nurse for more than thirty years. Her being on the scene has its plusses and minuses.
I was torn about going. I kept asking myself was it serious enough to warrant the trip. Plus, Roberta would have to deal with the fact of my sister and I and my mother all there, too. That is never a recipe for peace. I had just decided I would hold off going when Roberta said I should come. I loaded up the car and drove up on Sunday morning.
Originally, I was told my father would go into surgery at 7:30. I figured I would get to Saratoga just in time for him to get out of surgery.
He was still in recovery by the time I got there. My mother and Stephanie were in the waiting room. Oddly enough, on the way to the room, I bumped into a classmate who I had know from my elementary school days named Susie Triebes nee Voisnet. She was at the hospital while her father-in-law recovered from a heart attack. It was an awkward conversation while we compared our sorrows.
The surgeon came and told us the surgery went well. My father would probably be in the hospital until Tuesday. He was still unconscious but should be awake to watch the Super Bowl that afternoon. He told us we should come back then.
We went back to the house so my mother could nap and I could torture Stephanie about her Seahawks. Oh, what a great ending to the game.
We had to wait in the family waiting room outside the ICU on the second floor. There was another group of people in there with us talking loudly and playing obnoxious videos on their cel phones. I gave them a glare but they wouldn’t stop. I had to step out of the room to get some quiet.
Eventually we were allowed to enter. Stephanie was having a bit of a freak out since they wouldn’t let us in immediately. Plus, they called us in and then they failed to open the door.
The ICU was full. Lots of beds with silent people that we could see behind glass doors as we walked to my father’s room.
It’s no fun seeing people in hospital beds especially ones who are supposed to be invulnerable. They had wires running all over his body. He had the whole panoply of machines surrounding his bed. Tubes fed oxygen to his nose while his handy catheter drained to bag at the end of the bed.
My father was pretty dazed as we sat there in the room with them. Roberta’s boyfriend, Michael came with her for moral support. His presence came off as awkward. I don’t know if they are close enough for this kind of support.
We spent about an hour and a half with my father before deciding to head back to the house. I always feel bad leaving people alone in the hospital because there isn’t a lot for people to do in hospital beds. Plus, you are leaving them in the care of strangers. Sure, it is their job to look out for their patients. But it never felt right to leave.
Since my parents had turned the house into the 1 bedroom, five den monstrosity, I opted to sleep on the couch in my old bedroom rather than open it out into a bed. The couch was the more comfortable of the two bad options.
I was probably asleep for about 30 minutes when my sister knocked and entered, filling my room with the bright light from the hallway. I barked at her for waking me. She informed me she was heading back to the hospital.
In my father’s drug addled state, he had thought he was at home and was going to get up and go to the bathroom. Despite all the wires and tubes attached to him, he got up out of his hospital bed and made it to the door of his room.
Either the cords tripped him up or he fell because of the drugs. He ended up face planting in the door to his room. The fall caused him to disconnect his oxygen, so he started to turn blue. He had a massive bump on the crown of his head as well as a severely bruised left knee.
I waited up at home to get a report back from Stephanie on the extent of his injuries. My mother clamored to go with her but we said she would only be in the way.
Here is one of those points were it sucks to be old. Granted, I do not get along with my mother. That is a given. But if she had been anyone else who wanted to desperately to be with her ailing husband, I would given credence to her demands. As it is, I made her stay at home because it seemed like grand standing on her part to be part of the drama rather than being shunted aside while attention was paid elsewhere.
I got the call around midnight from Stephanie. My father was going to be all right. She reported his injuries and what had happened. I passed the news on to my mother.
All the time I was there, it was just a swirl of doctors, nurses, and helpers. Every shift was a different group. I never saw the same nurse from day to day. Some of them were good. Some of them I wanted to take to the back room for a beating.
We did have one consistent Doctor, Dr. Musely. I’m guessing she was about a year older than Doogie Howser. But Stephanie vouched for her, saying she did know her stuff.
Stephanie was a terror to the staff because of her knowledge and wouldn’t let them give sub standard care to my father. She got him moved to a single room when they wanted to put him in a double. She got him a special bed to help alleviate the pain in his back and his rear. Every new nurse got the constant quiz on what they were doing.
Because of his fall, my father got a round the clock sitter to make sure he didn’t attempt to climb out of the bed again.
Late Monday, he moved from ICU to Telemetry. They put him in a double room at first. But Stephanie complained about how was he supposed to be watched carefully if there was another patient in the room with him. He’d already gotten out his bed while being carefully watched in ICU.
While we waited for the new room, we got to listen to the other patients alarm going off every minute. He wasn’t supposed to move his arm but if he did, it set off the alarm. It always took forever for the nurses to come and reset it.
At about 8pm on Monday, we were informed that the single room was ready. We were just waiting on the new bed. And we waited. And waited.
I made the decision to just move him. We could deal with the bed later. Especially since he was finally starting to fall asleep.
Hallucinations from sleep deprivation and meds hit my father all day. He kept seeing things in the room and reaching out to touch them. At one point, he was telling my mother to get out of the way because the Wrigley man was coming up behind her.
In the new room, my father finally started to go to sleep. But the nurses came in for his round of meds and take some blood. Of course they couldn’t just come in and do this. They had to start and stop until the whole procedure took over 45 minutes. It was maddening.
Then just when he was nodding off again, the new bed showed up. By this time, my father was a beaten man with all these requests to give blood and take these pills and now get into a different bed. He was deep into the “fine” mode.
When I arrived early Tuesday, he was all set to remove his wires and go home with me. I had to explain to him that he wasn’t going home today. That wasn’t good news for him.
My father had a couple of ongoing battles during his stay. His biggest was with the oxygen monitor attached to his index finger. He always picked at it or fought with the wire that ran back to the monitor. He removed it a couple of times, some because of hallucination, other times because of general irritation.
A more serious problem was all the fluid in my father’s lungs. They weren’t going to release him until that was under control.
Why did he have all that fluid in his body? Well, when they admitted him, they stopped all his medications that he’d been taking for the last ten years. He takes Lasik every day to help this and he wasn’t taking it. He’s also very particular about his insulin regimen and that was way out of whack.
And the one problem that was killing him was that he couldn’t take his nightly sleeping pills. Basically, he hadn’t slept since he got into the hospital which was about four days at this point. He was begging Roberta, Stephanie, and me to bring his sleeping pills from home.
His doctors didn’t want to chance it because of his head injury. It was a tough spot to be in.
The worst part came after my father had finally gone to sleep. Right before that, he had been seeing a lot of strange things in the room. He was seeing multiple object. A plastic machine attached to the wall was bugging him. I felt it necessary to report this to the nurse.
She came in while he slept and flashed a light in his eyes to check him. He was awake again.
Tuesday was more of the same. My father was using my laptop in his dreams. He kept calling out for me to check some applications on my computer for him. He did this a bunch of times. I just started agreeing with him and saying I was taking care of it.
Later that night after the fight for the right sleeping meds, the floor administrator called me to the hall for a quick chat. Steph and my mother had left and I was on my own.
Well Francesca, the administrator, thought it was time for my father to be moved back into a double room. She was of the opinion that it wasn’t really necessary for him to be by himself.
Let’s just say I was not in the best frame of mind to deal with someone who wanted to screw around again with my father’s treatment, especially since he had just gone to sleep. Francesca tried to explain to me why it was a good idea, especially if you were the hospital, to move him. Other patients needed this level of care.
I asked if she was trying to kill him. I explained why he needed to be by himself with a sitter, especially since they couldn’t even guarantee his care when he was in the ICU. She left the rather angry man.
I didn’t see her again except at a distance. Dr. Musely came in and I gave her both barrels as well about this proposed move. We also went another round about his sleep meds. She acquiesced to giving him some Melatonin. It was something, but still not powerful enough.
Yes, we did wake him up to give it to him.
Dr. Musely steered clear of me for the rest of the night, too. I waited a long time in the hospital to make sure they didn’t move him after I left.
I was originally going to go home on Wednesday, but my father was still in such bad shape that I opted to stay another day. I got there early. My father again asked for his sleeping pills. He still looked exhausted.
Dr. Musely said he could have his pills if we brought his Cpap machine from home. He still had too much water in his lungs to go home. We had further fights about where he should be getting his oxygen readings taken from. Because of his neuropathy, it is a problem gauging the accuracy of the readings from his fingers.
My father was so pissed off about the sleep meds, that I got the nurse to bring them in so he could see them. But again, the dosage was off. He was used to taking 80mg. 40mg when he went to be and 40mg again when he woke up around 4pm.
Well, they gave him 40mg for the whole night. He opted to not take them until 10pm.
Now, according to the Dr. Musely, he wasn’t to take them until he had the Cpap on. And one of my least favorite nurses said she couldn’t do it. We had to get some one from respiratory therapy to come in and put it on properly. The call went out for RT to come pay us a visit.
My father decided to go bed. We wouldn’t give him the pills until he was fitted. He had to wait about an hour for RT to show up. My father was asleep by that time. It was also awkward since my sister had just zipped up the case and brought it not realizing there was a used catheter bag in the case.
Good times.
I left early Thursday leaving my father in the hands of Kaiser.
I learned that he woke up at 1 am after the meds had worn off and wanted to go home. I don’t blame him.
He eventually got to leave the hospital on Saturday. He promptly went to sleep for 12 hours.
I can’t remember the story to reference it properly but involved a man getting swept up in the machinery of a the hospital. He was in good health but hospitals only see problems so they found them in him. During the course of his stay his condition worsened under the gentle ministrations of the doctors. Maybe it was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. It could have been Shock Corridor.
The fragments of those stories flittered about mind as I watched my father in the hospital. He was bad when he went in, but they weren’t doing him any favors. In my opinion, he was just a problem to be solved rather than a patient to be cared for.
But it was such a bad experience, I felt the need to keep some record of it. Maybe you will see this story in a lawsuit someday or on an op-ed piece in the San Jose Mercury. So, here we go.
Two weeks ago on Monday January 28th, my sister Roberta called to inform me that my father had gone to the San Jose Kaiser Emergency. He’d spent Sunday night in agony trying and failing to urinate.
Failing to urinate is especially problematic since my father takes Lasik, a drug designed to remove water from your body. Basically, he goes to the bathroom about every 30 minutes. The idea of him not being able to go was especially chilling.
The Kaiser Doctors diagnosed him with a urinary tract infection. They treated him by installing a catheter and giving him antibiotics. On the phone later, I joked with him that he caught it from my mother, the joke being that my mother is in a constant state of urinary tract infection. My mother had to explain to me that is not how people get urinary tract infections when she heard me.
The catheter was quite painful for my father. He complained that they weren’t giving him enough pain meds to help him. Now, the Lynch pain threshold is quite high so the fact my dad was complaining about pain was a bit of a shocker. The plan was for him to have the catheter in for a week.
On Thursday, I get another call from Roberta. My father has gone back to the hospital. On Wednesday, he called Roberta to the house because he started to slur his speech. He was afraid he was in the midst of a stroke.
I didn’t realize it, but there is a stroke test you can give people. She did this and he seemed to be okay. She called 911 anyway. The operator asked her to give my father the stroke test again.
Well they bundled him up and took him back to Kaiser. The diagnosis this time was that a piece of plaque from his Carotid artery might have broken off and gone to his brain. But the MRI or CAT was inconclusive. They wanted to do surgery but they wouldn’t be able to get to him until the weekend, so they sent him home.
Late Thursday, I get a call from my mother. The hospital wants my father back. I guess they figured it didn’t make a lot of sense for him to be sitting at home with a potentially life threatening problem when he could be monitored in the hospital. My mother didn’t like the idea of him having surgery.
My mother has a long standing phobia about surgery. When she was young, a relative died on the operating table. In her mind, everyone who goes under anesthesia is just going to die. This is why she has never had the surgeries to make her life more comfortable and alleviate the pain from her ailments.
I had to yell at my mom because she didn’t want to take my father back. I told her she was irrational about her phobia and I didn’t want to let her fear interfere with my father’s care. There was a lot of angry silence on the phone from my mother’s end as she hung up.
My father went back into the hospital on Friday. He was going to have surgery on either Saturday or Sunday. Tests had revealed that he had 70% blockage in his right Carotid. The vascular surgeons were going to go in and open the blocked artery.
My sister Stephanie opted to fly down on Saturday to be with him. Stephanie has been a nurse for more than thirty years. Her being on the scene has its plusses and minuses.
I was torn about going. I kept asking myself was it serious enough to warrant the trip. Plus, Roberta would have to deal with the fact of my sister and I and my mother all there, too. That is never a recipe for peace. I had just decided I would hold off going when Roberta said I should come. I loaded up the car and drove up on Sunday morning.
Originally, I was told my father would go into surgery at 7:30. I figured I would get to Saratoga just in time for him to get out of surgery.
He was still in recovery by the time I got there. My mother and Stephanie were in the waiting room. Oddly enough, on the way to the room, I bumped into a classmate who I had know from my elementary school days named Susie Triebes nee Voisnet. She was at the hospital while her father-in-law recovered from a heart attack. It was an awkward conversation while we compared our sorrows.
The surgeon came and told us the surgery went well. My father would probably be in the hospital until Tuesday. He was still unconscious but should be awake to watch the Super Bowl that afternoon. He told us we should come back then.
We went back to the house so my mother could nap and I could torture Stephanie about her Seahawks. Oh, what a great ending to the game.
We had to wait in the family waiting room outside the ICU on the second floor. There was another group of people in there with us talking loudly and playing obnoxious videos on their cel phones. I gave them a glare but they wouldn’t stop. I had to step out of the room to get some quiet.
Eventually we were allowed to enter. Stephanie was having a bit of a freak out since they wouldn’t let us in immediately. Plus, they called us in and then they failed to open the door.
The ICU was full. Lots of beds with silent people that we could see behind glass doors as we walked to my father’s room.
It’s no fun seeing people in hospital beds especially ones who are supposed to be invulnerable. They had wires running all over his body. He had the whole panoply of machines surrounding his bed. Tubes fed oxygen to his nose while his handy catheter drained to bag at the end of the bed.
My father was pretty dazed as we sat there in the room with them. Roberta’s boyfriend, Michael came with her for moral support. His presence came off as awkward. I don’t know if they are close enough for this kind of support.
We spent about an hour and a half with my father before deciding to head back to the house. I always feel bad leaving people alone in the hospital because there isn’t a lot for people to do in hospital beds. Plus, you are leaving them in the care of strangers. Sure, it is their job to look out for their patients. But it never felt right to leave.
Since my parents had turned the house into the 1 bedroom, five den monstrosity, I opted to sleep on the couch in my old bedroom rather than open it out into a bed. The couch was the more comfortable of the two bad options.
I was probably asleep for about 30 minutes when my sister knocked and entered, filling my room with the bright light from the hallway. I barked at her for waking me. She informed me she was heading back to the hospital.
In my father’s drug addled state, he had thought he was at home and was going to get up and go to the bathroom. Despite all the wires and tubes attached to him, he got up out of his hospital bed and made it to the door of his room.
Either the cords tripped him up or he fell because of the drugs. He ended up face planting in the door to his room. The fall caused him to disconnect his oxygen, so he started to turn blue. He had a massive bump on the crown of his head as well as a severely bruised left knee.
I waited up at home to get a report back from Stephanie on the extent of his injuries. My mother clamored to go with her but we said she would only be in the way.
Here is one of those points were it sucks to be old. Granted, I do not get along with my mother. That is a given. But if she had been anyone else who wanted to desperately to be with her ailing husband, I would given credence to her demands. As it is, I made her stay at home because it seemed like grand standing on her part to be part of the drama rather than being shunted aside while attention was paid elsewhere.
I got the call around midnight from Stephanie. My father was going to be all right. She reported his injuries and what had happened. I passed the news on to my mother.
All the time I was there, it was just a swirl of doctors, nurses, and helpers. Every shift was a different group. I never saw the same nurse from day to day. Some of them were good. Some of them I wanted to take to the back room for a beating.
We did have one consistent Doctor, Dr. Musely. I’m guessing she was about a year older than Doogie Howser. But Stephanie vouched for her, saying she did know her stuff.
Stephanie was a terror to the staff because of her knowledge and wouldn’t let them give sub standard care to my father. She got him moved to a single room when they wanted to put him in a double. She got him a special bed to help alleviate the pain in his back and his rear. Every new nurse got the constant quiz on what they were doing.
Because of his fall, my father got a round the clock sitter to make sure he didn’t attempt to climb out of the bed again.
Late Monday, he moved from ICU to Telemetry. They put him in a double room at first. But Stephanie complained about how was he supposed to be watched carefully if there was another patient in the room with him. He’d already gotten out his bed while being carefully watched in ICU.
While we waited for the new room, we got to listen to the other patients alarm going off every minute. He wasn’t supposed to move his arm but if he did, it set off the alarm. It always took forever for the nurses to come and reset it.
At about 8pm on Monday, we were informed that the single room was ready. We were just waiting on the new bed. And we waited. And waited.
I made the decision to just move him. We could deal with the bed later. Especially since he was finally starting to fall asleep.
Hallucinations from sleep deprivation and meds hit my father all day. He kept seeing things in the room and reaching out to touch them. At one point, he was telling my mother to get out of the way because the Wrigley man was coming up behind her.
In the new room, my father finally started to go to sleep. But the nurses came in for his round of meds and take some blood. Of course they couldn’t just come in and do this. They had to start and stop until the whole procedure took over 45 minutes. It was maddening.
Then just when he was nodding off again, the new bed showed up. By this time, my father was a beaten man with all these requests to give blood and take these pills and now get into a different bed. He was deep into the “fine” mode.
When I arrived early Tuesday, he was all set to remove his wires and go home with me. I had to explain to him that he wasn’t going home today. That wasn’t good news for him.
My father had a couple of ongoing battles during his stay. His biggest was with the oxygen monitor attached to his index finger. He always picked at it or fought with the wire that ran back to the monitor. He removed it a couple of times, some because of hallucination, other times because of general irritation.
A more serious problem was all the fluid in my father’s lungs. They weren’t going to release him until that was under control.
Why did he have all that fluid in his body? Well, when they admitted him, they stopped all his medications that he’d been taking for the last ten years. He takes Lasik every day to help this and he wasn’t taking it. He’s also very particular about his insulin regimen and that was way out of whack.
And the one problem that was killing him was that he couldn’t take his nightly sleeping pills. Basically, he hadn’t slept since he got into the hospital which was about four days at this point. He was begging Roberta, Stephanie, and me to bring his sleeping pills from home.
His doctors didn’t want to chance it because of his head injury. It was a tough spot to be in.
The worst part came after my father had finally gone to sleep. Right before that, he had been seeing a lot of strange things in the room. He was seeing multiple object. A plastic machine attached to the wall was bugging him. I felt it necessary to report this to the nurse.
She came in while he slept and flashed a light in his eyes to check him. He was awake again.
Tuesday was more of the same. My father was using my laptop in his dreams. He kept calling out for me to check some applications on my computer for him. He did this a bunch of times. I just started agreeing with him and saying I was taking care of it.
Later that night after the fight for the right sleeping meds, the floor administrator called me to the hall for a quick chat. Steph and my mother had left and I was on my own.
Well Francesca, the administrator, thought it was time for my father to be moved back into a double room. She was of the opinion that it wasn’t really necessary for him to be by himself.
Let’s just say I was not in the best frame of mind to deal with someone who wanted to screw around again with my father’s treatment, especially since he had just gone to sleep. Francesca tried to explain to me why it was a good idea, especially if you were the hospital, to move him. Other patients needed this level of care.
I asked if she was trying to kill him. I explained why he needed to be by himself with a sitter, especially since they couldn’t even guarantee his care when he was in the ICU. She left the rather angry man.
I didn’t see her again except at a distance. Dr. Musely came in and I gave her both barrels as well about this proposed move. We also went another round about his sleep meds. She acquiesced to giving him some Melatonin. It was something, but still not powerful enough.
Yes, we did wake him up to give it to him.
Dr. Musely steered clear of me for the rest of the night, too. I waited a long time in the hospital to make sure they didn’t move him after I left.
I was originally going to go home on Wednesday, but my father was still in such bad shape that I opted to stay another day. I got there early. My father again asked for his sleeping pills. He still looked exhausted.
Dr. Musely said he could have his pills if we brought his Cpap machine from home. He still had too much water in his lungs to go home. We had further fights about where he should be getting his oxygen readings taken from. Because of his neuropathy, it is a problem gauging the accuracy of the readings from his fingers.
My father was so pissed off about the sleep meds, that I got the nurse to bring them in so he could see them. But again, the dosage was off. He was used to taking 80mg. 40mg when he went to be and 40mg again when he woke up around 4pm.
Well, they gave him 40mg for the whole night. He opted to not take them until 10pm.
Now, according to the Dr. Musely, he wasn’t to take them until he had the Cpap on. And one of my least favorite nurses said she couldn’t do it. We had to get some one from respiratory therapy to come in and put it on properly. The call went out for RT to come pay us a visit.
My father decided to go bed. We wouldn’t give him the pills until he was fitted. He had to wait about an hour for RT to show up. My father was asleep by that time. It was also awkward since my sister had just zipped up the case and brought it not realizing there was a used catheter bag in the case.
Good times.
I left early Thursday leaving my father in the hands of Kaiser.
I learned that he woke up at 1 am after the meds had worn off and wanted to go home. I don’t blame him.
He eventually got to leave the hospital on Saturday. He promptly went to sleep for 12 hours.
I can’t remember the story to reference it properly but involved a man getting swept up in the machinery of a the hospital. He was in good health but hospitals only see problems so they found them in him. During the course of his stay his condition worsened under the gentle ministrations of the doctors. Maybe it was One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. It could have been Shock Corridor.
The fragments of those stories flittered about mind as I watched my father in the hospital. He was bad when he went in, but they weren’t doing him any favors. In my opinion, he was just a problem to be solved rather than a patient to be cared for.
So much for the flickr badge idea. Dammit
mt008