So mad beware of little mistakes?
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- 2 May 2012 by chris65
- Active
- 2 May 2012
Details:
I have a lot of health problems and learnt never to go alone to hospital .Well last Thursday my long awaited hystrecomy with I had waited for 2 months for was ready.
I checked my blood sugar and it was 224 but i was told to only take half dose insulin the night before. I got to hospital at 7 they checked it with their meter and it was 420.I am very brittle and stress dose rise it but i was kinda shocked they rechecked in 15 min and it read 436 so the nurse left to call surgeon I got my meter out and checked against theirs my read 310. Come to find out they had bad test strips no crap.
The nurse comes in with humlin r for coverage I told her repeatly I take humalog and a couple units will drop me .again in a half hour my sugar was 212 .By this time my 3 hr surgery room time was up and they had to cancel.When the dr came in I asked why the humlin r he said he ordered humalog. I also had a pic line in and one of the nurses did not turn it off and i had never had that antibotic before so with all the anger disappointing I had to wait to see if I was and lucky I was not. I had my husband and mother with me the whole time .
So now I am waitng on another scheduled appointment to due this. What if they would of checked another diabetic and covered them with a high dose of insulin.
Lesson learn they will admit me the night before its not protocol but i guess with all the mess ups and wasted time and being given a central line for anothing they bend rules.
thanks for letting me vent
I have learned to speak up if I feel something is wrong. Nurses in hospitals are expected to take care of more and more patients, at a time when nurses have more responsibilites for each, and if those strips were left on the shelf, she hurriedly grabbed them and never questioned them. And I've also learned that a doc will lie about not ordering something if the patient is dispeased, and blame the nurse. The other thing I've learned is to always recheck a result before acting on it.
Hello chris65. Welcome to the site. Hopefully you are well and will continue to have good health. Best of wishes to you, pledge
Hi Chris65, hope you are feeling better now & that your post opens the eyes of many... I recently have had a chance to witness this kind of "the right hand doesn't know what the left one's doing" attempt at medical care for a loved one after he fell 2 stories & what I found was that, we as patients (in your case) or family members in my case must be VERY INVOLVED in the process from beginning to end to be sure that the proper actions are being taken in our own & our loved one's health care. It is because that I understand that we are all IMPERFECT human beings that tells me questions must be asked all along the way... so I must commend you for double checking your sugar & getting to the bottom of why their reading was so different then yours!! You may have been inconvenienced & had to reschedule your procedure, certainly causing you & yours much anguish, but you may have also helped someone else out tremendously.
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Too many ppl believe that doctors & nurses are infoulable & shouldn't be questioned... WRONG!! I thank God for them & their knowledge & ask Him to guide them in all they do... best wishes to you & a speedy recovery!! :-)
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I had an anesthesiologist tell me that if something is wrong, they always blame the nurse!! I think it is one of the first lessons in medical school!! You are correct. I have seen them lie when a patient is displeased. It was someones job to test those strips. We had to calibrate our machine every morning before surgery! Someone must have decided they didnt have time for that, for too long, and unfortunately, you ended up with the bad strips. That is really poor management and it should not happen. Things that go on in the hospitals these days just shocks the crap out of me because it never would have happened back in the days when I worked in the hospital. But then, when I worked in the hospital we still gave baths and changed sheets every day! They dont do that anymore and look how nosocomial infections are on the rise! It is sad. Nurses are very overworked, have too many responsibilities and are way underpaid for the resposibility they take on.
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We do things now, that a generation ago was done only by Drs, and lay people are being trained for a few weeks as "nurse techs" and now they are doing what nurses used to do. Sometimes, who you may believe is a nurse, isnt even a nurse! Nurses are not being trained as rigorously as they were back when I and kaismama had our training. We were trained very "hands on" and now there is much more nursing theory being taught. It better grooms nurses to move on to supervisory roles but it doesnt teach them to care for their patients.
We aren't seeing the techs that are supposed to be giving meds in Virginia. The nurses all refused to have them work being covered by our licenses. There is more involved in giving meds, as all these questions show, then poking a pill in someone's mouth.