Health professionals know best....NOT.

[Dispatcher]

A couple of weeks ago, my wife became sick. She had the chills yet she said she felt like she burning up inside. She was confused and disoriented.
She was shaking like a leaf and she was having nausea. Since she is diabetic, I thought her blood sugar might be to high or too low. I checked it with her test kit twice and it was fine. By midnight, she has gotten much worse so I called an ambulance. I followed it to the ER. She was put in a little room and hooked up to a monitor. She was having trouble breathing so they hooked her up to oxygen. Then they left her there....for 2 hours. For 2 hours she never saw a doctor. Her condition continued to worsen. The ER was swamped. It looked like an ER from hell. Patients were everywhere.
It was then that I, just a lowly husband and non-health professional, figured out what was wrong with my wife. She was going through withdraw from Oxycontin. She must have forgotten to take it that morning, and by now, she would have taken her second dose 2 hours ago.
My wife suffers from Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, and degenerative back disease.
She has had a hip replacement, a knee replacement, and she needs to have the other knee and the hip replaced as well.
Because she is in so much constant pain, she takes 160mg of Oxycontin twice a day. To put this in perspective, this is what many patients are given that have advanced cancer. If you or I took that much, we would overdose and probably die, but she has been on it for years and has the tolerance of a horse.
Anyway, back to the story. As I said, I FINALLY figured out what the problem was. I told the head nurse that my wife needed Oxycontin STAT and explained why. Another hour went by. I started raising HELL. All the nurse kept telling me was that the doctor would be in to see my wife soon.
More time went by. By this time my wife was in extreme pain AND in the throes of full withdraw. I asked her what year it was and she said "1971".
I had had enough of this great health care system. I signed her out, took her home, gave her Oxycontin, and 30 minutes later she was completely back to normal, alert, and feeling fine.
I have learned a lot from this experience....
A. The health care system is great at treating symptoms, but it sucks at treating the actual causes.
B. Most doctors and nurses believe that patients and patient's families are idiots.
C. A hospital is an assembly line, and patients are herded around like cattle, and with the same amount of regard.
D. Sometimes, you or your family members know more that so called "health professionals"
E. Modern medicine still has a lot to learn. 200 years from now, doctors will be appalled that a woman's breast was once cut off because of breast cancer, just as doctors now are appalled at the kind of medicine practiced during the civil war, when doctors didn't even wash their hands between surgeries.

[kombayn]

It's time to look into a new local hospital around your area or possibly seeing if there are call-in doctors. Though they'll be much more expensive. I'm glad you were able to figure out the problem, that's some super-strong medication there. You should write to the hospital and tell them about the problem you had with the doctors (find out nurses names etc). Trust me, writing to the higher-ups helps fix future problems for other people. But this does show the times of the health-care system, now could you imagine a socialized system? It would be way worse because the hospital would be over-packed even more than it was and the quality of care would go to shit, because the employee's pay would go down and it would be understaffed. The wait times would increase by 3 times as a guess-timate.