My wife was under the care of a local hospital for about eighty hours at the end of April. We walked out at 2:00 a.m. on a Monday because the new floor we’d been moved to happened to have a staff that declined our request for pain management, stonewalled, lied, and delayed until bringing us yet another ineffective dose of Tylenol, expecting us to just shut up and behave. We went home and I nursed her back to health.
Our particular complaint isn’t the subject of this essay, though. Sick people usually complain, and that will tempt any nursing staff to dismiss complaints. It is the prerogative of the patient, though, to decide whether or not he will submit to the judgment of the medical attendants, so this essay applies to all patients.
Although walking out was frightening to my wife (who is quite obedient to authority), it was a tremendous relief to us both to be back home. We used leftover oxycodone and experimented with the dosage (as we have through earlier surgical recoveries) according to her pain levels and durations. She slept in her own bed, chose her own diet, used her own toilet, wore a nightgown that wasn’t degrading, and was at peace. Her original ailment was kidney malfunction due to dehydration; but that had passed and she was in recovery, so going home was not dangerous.
The nursing staff (on the previous floor) had botched an IV and a calcium drip had extravasated into her arm. Calcium is quite an irritant over time and it became very painful as the night progressed; hence our complaints to the deaf ears of the affirmative-action caregivers we last encountered.
At home we were responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, meaning that, although we were willing to take the blame if we failed, we at least had the dignity of not being yanked around as though we were in prison.
The emergency room staff had probably saved my wife’s life with their swift diagnosis of kidney failure (which was merely temporary) and their administration of various infusions to remediate the potassium, acid, and calcium levels. I give them full credit with gratitude.
It makes little sense to blame a hospital for the failure of an IV insertion on an elderly patient with dilapidated veins, so I had no hesitation in returning to the same institution when my wife’s arm wasn’t healing properly at the end of May. Obviously our earlier dissatisfaction was prominently displayed in her record, for we got the royal treatment at every turn. They treated her with antibiotics and she’s now (another month later) under the care of a wound specialist, with yet another month to go.
Most of this information is to give context for you, the reader, to understand my stance on leaving the hospital Against Medical Advice. Don’t hesitate much to do it if you wish to. You have available a limitless number of providers of medical services, but you have only one soul.