Letters from NYC

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Good: All of you for the wonderful messages of support I received. They were touching, they arrived whenever I was worried or my spirits were low.

The Bad: My son needing emergency care for post surgical complications. We were in the ER for over 8hrs dealing with a number of symptoms and finally arrived at root cause to treat it and have been back home now for 18hrs without a relapse. YAY!

The Ugly: New York University Hospital's Emergency Room. One of the top teaching hospitals in the country and the conditions in their environment would fail the American Hospital Accreditation's exam for cleanliness. Not only were the conditions deplorable, they did away with their pediatric emergency ward. I also forgot that June 30 is the date that most residents and Attending's school terms ends and the new docs don't begin until after July 4th. When we were almost done, they wheeled a man into my son's room who was having a heart attack and began working on him as my son looked on. There was no curtain I could close, nothing I could do except pick up my son and carry him to an empty bed down the hall. It pissed off the nurses because we used an empty bed that would now have to be cleaned after we left but I didn't care. My son's mental well being was more important that what these witches thought/said. Oh, I took names and will be reporting the entire hospital to every major place I can. I even took pictures with my cell phone camera to show the violations.

I will never, ever go back there again!

As for me, I'm so sleep deprived I've been making mistakes of judgement and of action. I've been having to stay up to care and medicate my son and although I hired a visiting nurse to help me, I ran errands and started my chemotherapy while she was with my son. Unfortunately they don't work on weekends so no rest for the weary. It seems that I won't get any sleep until possibly sunday night when my brother in law comes to visit and will stay overnight to give me a break.

The worse 2 mistakes I've made was stepping onto oncoming traffic on a busy roadway and forgetting when and if I took my medication. I'm now writing down all the info and have set up alarms in my pda telling me who gets what medicine when. That's a big help! Actually, when we got to the ER, the Dr. was amazed that although I wasn't too coherent or intelligently making correlations, that I at least wrote my son's medical history into my pda prior to his surgery so that I wouldn't forget anything during admission intake. He was not only able to speed the process of my son's assessment by using this history but asked that I download it via the bluetooth feature to the hospital's computer all the info on fever stats, amount/times of fluid intake etc.

As for my son, althought he's hanging in there he's very weak. Not having been able to hold any food down for almost 4 days took a toll on his little body and he lost 6 lbs. He's on liquids only for now until he's able to handle soft solids like ice cream, yogurts and soups.

Well, that's all for now as I have to begin the coaxing, bribing etc. to have my son increase his fluid intake amount. Again, thanks for your emails and voice mail messages, they were greatly appreciated.

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Posted by Michele at July 1, 2006 11:50 AM | TrackBack