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It’s brutal treatment, really.  For most who have gone through it, they’d do anything to avoid repeating the experience.  You are stabbed repeatedly, fed horrible food (if you’re lucky enough to get fed at all), you may be denied anything to drink, you are awakened repeatedly everytime you are fortunate enough to drift off to sleep in the noisy, uncomfortable surroundings, you are forced to ingest various chemicals, some of which make it impossible for you to even function, and you are constantly exposed to infection and disease-ridden surroundings.  Where is this hell on earth?  Is it in a prison in some third world nation?  No.  It’s your local hospital.

Now some of you reading this may think I’m being unfair.  After all, the hospital is a place of healing, right?  Well, there may be some hospitals out there that are better than others, but unfortunately, most hospitals are far from being places of healing.  Places of medical treatment, yes, but healing, no.  Hospitals are of course necessary and can be life-saving, but this is not exactly the same as being health-promoting.

As an example, my father is currently in the hospital in Florida. I’m in Texas and kind of going nuts that for various reasons I have not been able to go watch out for him.  Fortunately, my sister has been there to be his advocate, because, as you’ll learn from the story, he definitely needed one. 

To try to keep a long story relatively short, dad was having a lot of hip pain and he limped around on it for a couple of weeks before finally mom insisted that he go to the hospital, where they determined that he had a broken hip and that he would need surgery.  So far so good.  Unfortunately, the surgeon wasn’t going to be available right away, so they put dad on pain medication and admitted him.  Apparently, he had a clot break loose from the fracture and this caused a heart attack (which fortunately does not appear to have caused any lasting damage). He was put on blood thinners to dissolve the clot and since the heart seemed to be stable, he was scheduled for surgery and they performed a partial hip replacement a few days ago.  Now, all of the forgoing falls into the necessary and potentially life-saving role of a hospital that I alluded to before.  It is what has happened since then that makes me wonder how anyone manages to survive going to the hospital, particularly if they don’t have someone else to look out for their interests like my sister has been doing for my dad.. 

So now we’re at the point where dad’s supposed to be recovering from his surgery.  Due to the fact that he was initially pretty out of it from the pain medication, he was not allowed to have anything to eat or drink as a precaution against aspiration (breathing in food or liquid and choking).  That’s perfectly rational, but they didn’t give him any kind of IV nutrition either.  We’re talking about no food or liquid of any kind for two days for a man in his late 70s who is pretty thin to begin with and has a pretty high natural metabolism, and who has just had surgery (which typically causes increased nutritional needs).  Dad started coming out of the medication haze and he was hungry, his mouth was dry to the point of cracking and bleeding inside, and he was pretty darned cranky - but the nursing staff still would not allow any food or drink.  My sister finally managed to get the surgeon to put in the orders to allow food and drink - which lasted for one meal until the other nursing staff rotation came back in and re-instituted the no food or drink order (despite the doctor’s orders).  So now we’re at a point where dad ate a total of  a few hundred calories over a three day period. 

Enter the physical therapy staff, who thankfully, opted to start pretty gently on the first day and just begin with dad sitting in a chair for 45 minutes with instructions to the nurses to let him get back to bed after that.  Well, dad was to be transferred out of ICU to  a regular room that day, and instead of letting him go back to bed, they kept him in the chair for nearly 2 hours.  Now that might not have been such a big deal if not for the fact that he had to be extremely hypoglycemic by this point (and apparently anemic too as we found out after the fact).  But with the lack of blood sugar and the pain, dad was pretty wiped out by the extra time being upright.   By the time he got to the regular room, he was shaking, hallucinating, and pretty much incoherent.  There was some talk that perhaps he had suffered a stroke.  Thankfully, now that he was out of ICU, my sister was able to finally get him some food, which he managed to painfully eat, since his mouth was so dry and full of sores (not having been allowed to drink anything for days).  Remarkably, his “stroke” symptoms began to quickly improve and he started to show signs of recovery. 

Now, I know I’m just a natural healing “quack”, but it seems to me that  food is a pretty basic physical need that was being knowingly neglected by the hospital staff.  If not for my sister, dad still might not have been given anything to eat. 

And dad was not the only patient being neglected.  After being moved out of ICU, dad had a roomate.  The roomate had been there for ten days and was to be discharged the next day.  That evening, a respiratory therapist came in to see the roomate, but the gentleman had been given a sedative 30 minutes prior and was sound asleep.  The respiratory therapist made some comment about the fact that the patient was supposed to be on a CPAP machine (a machine to force air into the lungs for patients who have sleep apnea).  As it turns out, he was supposed to be on a CPAP the whole time he was there, but in the whole 10 days of the gentleman’s hospital stay, nobody had bothered to fill the order.

I might be able to consider this an isolated case of a bad hospital, but over the years, I’ve heard from many people, including doctors and nurses that work at hospitals about the care, or lack thereof that has become typical in hospitals.  Patients get neglected when they need attention, they get awakened for tests multiple times when they need rest, and antibiotic-resistant infections run rampant.  One patient who is a nurse came to me for allergy symptoms that she only experienced while at work in the hospital and I mentioned that it might be a reaction to one of the cleaning products they use.  She responded, “No, I don’t think it’s that, because they really don’t clean there that much!”  (Note to self - don’t have surgery in THAT hospital!).  The same nurse tells me that she is horrified by the neglect of patients that she sees when she comes back on the clock after her days off - patients not being fed, patients lying in their own feces, patients developing bedsores from not being turned in bed, etc..  Some of these problems are due to budget cutbacks and the resulting understaffing, but some of it is plain old poor management.  As this nurse tells me, yes they are overworked and understaffed, but if the necessary things get done when it’s her shift, there’s no legitimate reason why they aren’t getting done when she’s off.  The personnel simply aren’t being managed properly.

Despite all of this, sometimes there’s no avoiding a hospital stay.  If you have to go in the hospital though, I strongly recommend that you arrange to have someone to be there as much as possible to advocate for you.  You need someone who will complain and work their way up the chain of command on your behalf until you get the care that you need.  In an emergency situation, you will not have the luxury of choosing which hospital to go to, but in situations where you can choose a hospital, take a little time and check with the Department of Health in your state regarding complaints against the hospitals in your area and try to choose those with the best record. 

Ultimately, the best way to avoid a hospital nightmare is to take good care of yourself and your health so hopefully you’ll never have a health problem serious enough to require a hospital stay.  It is my goal to provide you with the information you need through this blog to help you live a healthy lifestyle and maintain your good health for a lifetime.

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