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As a nurse I can tell you if we let you get your sleep and you dropped dead in the middle of the night, there'd be a lawsuit. Do you think we want to be waking cranky rude patients up at midnight and 4 am to take vitals? Hell no. But because we do, we find some people who need immediate intervention so they don't die. You're in the hospital to STAY ALIVE, not get "well", that's for home or outpatient rehab.
You're welcome.
PS... so glad I don't work in a hospital anymore thanks to ungrateful, know-it-all patients like so many on this thread...
This! I could tell several stories of people suddenly taking a turn for the worse and needing immediate intervention.
We are required to round hourly. People still moan and groan saying they haven't gotten enough attention.
You have no idea what you're talking about. It's called leaving AMA: against medical advice. People do it all the time, and no one is tied down to prevent them from leaving, unless perhaps a psych patient in a mental ward or a patient threatening suicide/homicide.
Yep, exactly! I've never ever seen anyone "tied down". I have seen confused, combative, or totally out of control people who might require soft wrist/ankle restraints for a short period of time to keep them safe. This requires a doctors order. Usually though, such people are assigned a sitter.
People leave AMA all the time. Usually it's a smoker, drug seeker, or someone who feels the haven't gotten enough attention.
Room is too warm and the sheet is scratchy and the visitors are noisy and the spouse is worried and beeping is annoying and the nurses are ugly and the doctors don't care and they charge you $50 for a oxycodone when I got leftovers that cost me $1 and I get sicker even if I take one.
LOL! Thanks for making me laugh!
I think the worse thing is the hospital bill at the end! I would say the food is horrible, cold scrambled eggs, boring, nothing to do but wait for nurses and your food.
As a nurse I can tell you if we let you get your sleep and you dropped dead in the middle of the night, there'd be a lawsuit. Do you think we want to be waking cranky rude patients up at midnight and 4 am to take vitals? Hell no. But because we do, we find some people who need immediate intervention so they don't die. You're in the hospital to STAY ALIVE, not get "well", that's for home or outpatient rehab.
You're welcome.
PS... so glad I don't work in a hospital anymore thanks to ungrateful, know-it-all patients like so many on this thread...
And we're all so glad you're not in a hospital either!
Seriously, it's not possible to both stay alive AND to get well?
More hospitals are recognizing that the lack of sleep and proper rest have very negative impacts on patients:
As a nurse it's pretty crazy you have no sympathy/empathy - guess you burned out and never recovered. Good riddance to anyone in healthcare who feels and thinks this way.
This! I could tell several stories of people suddenly taking a turn for the worse and needing immediate intervention.
We are required to round hourly. People still moan and groan saying they haven't gotten enough attention.
Perhaps they haven't gotten the kind of attention that they actually REQUIRE rather than the kind that allows you to check off a box on one of your forms?
I just spent 36 hours in the hospital. Atrial-fibrillation and with pneumonia in the left lung. A new wrinkle to add to premature ventricular complexes or contractions.
Now a-fib won't kill me, but it could cause a clot to lead to a stroke, and the pneumonia was a total surprise to us all, staff and me and my OH and a close friend who accompanied my OH to the ER.
I think the worst thing is trying to sleep in a hospital. They gave me a sedative to put me to sleep. I slept for all of one hour before some....ahem....nurses aid came in at 12 midnight to take bp with a malfunctioning automatic bp machine, then in my lucid state tried taking my watch off!!! I said "' what the (heck) you doing? '". She said she needed my watch off to take bp. I said "'(horsepuckies), they had been taking it all day with the watch ON my wrist'".
Than at 3:50 ( by the clock on the wall and my still on watch), the vampire came in,
then at 5 am they came in to take yet another EKG.
At 6:30 They took me down for Echo cardiogram.
So my "sedative/ sedated sleep" was severely disrupted.
Many think the food sucks, but I find the food quite palatable.
It's sleeping when ill and (usually exhausted), I miss when in the hospital.
How about you? What do you hate about being in (admitted) the hospital?
I am going provide you a little physiology lesson about new onset atrial fibrillation and hopefully you will realize the seriousness of this condition and the need for close monitoring while initial treatment is given to control this irregular heart rhythm.
Our heart's ability to pump blood throughout our body is a mechanism initiated by an electrical impulse. This electrical impulse begins in the SA node located in the right atria of the heart which initiates an electrical current. As this current travels along heart muscle fibers this causes the right atria then the left to contract. This contraction of the atria causes the blood in these heart chambers to be pumped down to the lower chambers of the heart called ventricles. That electrical current continues to travel along the muscle fibers of the ventricles causing them to contract and pump blood out to the rest of the body. In normal heart functioning individuals although there are parameter variations that electrical pump mechanism should happen between 70-80 x a minute which the contraction of the ventricles is what is measured when a pulse is taken.
Individuals like yourself with atrial fibrillation for a variety of reasons something has disrupted the electrical impulse mechanism in the SA node. This creates rapid weak random electrical firings that are not strong enough to make the atria contract and not strong enough to continue the circuit down to the ventricles to cause them to contract. When that blood located in the atria remains there longer than it should it begins to pool which can cause blood clots to form. Eventually a normal electrical firing will break through the aberrant firings which is strong enough to make the atria contract and pump blood to the ventricles and continue a normal circuit. If blood clots have formed during the pooling process in the atria they are carried along with the rest of the blood being pumped to the ventricles. If those blood clots are large enough they can cause full coronary artery occlusion. And even smaller clots can cause a full occlusion if they lodge in an artery that may already be partially occluded with plaque and the end result can be a lethal heart attack. If the blood clots manages to get through the coronary arteries they continue on their travels and can occlude vessels elsewhere including the brain causing a stroke. FYI, strokes can also be lethal depending on how much brain death they cause, and if they don't result in death the often irreversible damage they cause for those who have suffered a major one sadly often wish they did not survive it.
Treatment of new onset atrial fibrillation is aimed at two things, 1st is to control the aberrant atrial heart electrical conduction flaw with a variety of medications which have to be monitored very closely because individual outcomes can't be 100% predicted, and 2nd is anticoagulant therapy which aim is to prevent blood clot formation. Anticoagulant therapy unfortunately for the most part can't be organ specific, so it impacts the clotting ability throughout the body which can render a patient prone to hemorrhage and the most serious being cerebral. So trying to treat two moving targets with a variety of therapies which those therapies themselves can cause lethal outcomes is no easy task. And additionally in your situation you had a pneumonia which needed to be treated with an antibiotic, and many antibiotics can and do interact negatively with anticoagulant therapy and adding that to the mix makes treating your atrial fibrillation along with pneumonia even more difficult.
Maybe you can now understand why your sleep was disrupted to have your vital signs, EKGs, and labs drawn multiple times because all these inconveniences were necessary to monitor for effectiveness of your treatment as well as monitor for and prevent negative outcomes.
From my 40 years of experience as an R.N. in my professional opinion you making it home alive following a hospitalization for two potentially life threatening medical issues I would consider a very positive outcome despite some less than positive experiences you encountered during your hospitalization.
I've only been in a hospital twice in the last few years; once for a blood clot and once for a hip replacement. After reading the experiences of others here, I feel as if I really lucked out. I was in two different ones and my experiences were not bad at all. The highlight both times were the nurses; they were efficient and most of all very pleasant. Not that I want to go back anytime soon, but I certainly not have the horror stories I've been seeing here.
How about you? What do you hate about being in (admitted) the hospital?
Quote:
Originally Posted by jrkliny
I continue to be amazed at the comments on this thread. People seem to enjoy complaining about the minor irritations of being in a hospital. I would include having your blood drawn, having difficulty sleeping and not liking the food among the minor complaints. Some of you do not seem to understand the gravity of the issue. Improper medical care, mainly for hospitalized patients, is the third leading cause of death and results in about 250,000 deaths a year.
Don't know why you're "amazed" at the comments and consider them to be petty. The OP specifically asked people to comment on their personal experiences while being hospitalized. I can't be 100% certain, of course, but I'm reasonably sure that none of the posters who responded had died while hospitalized due to medical malpractice.
The heavy inflate-deflate cuffs they put on your legs. They claim it's to prevent venous stasis in your legs but, believe me...it's to make doubly sure you don't try to get out of that bed. Strapping patients to their bed which was commonplace once upon a time, is a no-no these days. So they do this instead. Insurance companies apparently now require it. Falls are expensive. I still say straps are cheaper.
No, they don't. Moreover, you are perfectly free to refuse any treatment you don't want, including not having those cuffs on your legs. (But then don't complain when you get a DVT...)
Similarly, some posters have complained about being awakened in the middle of the night to have their BP checked or other vital signs taken. Again, this is something you don't have to put up with if you don't want. As I noted above, patients are entitled to refuse any treatment, and that includes having their vital signs checked. I routinely tell the night-shift nurse not to wake me up to take vital signs. Of course, I wouldn't recommend doing so if you're in for a heart condition or something equally serious where it's important that your vital signs be monitored around-the-clock.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jamary1
#3 thing I hate, too: The doctor who is going to be there "any minute now" to discharge you.
Yet another surgery. It was only supposed to be outpatient surgery, but they decided to keep me overnight. Starting at 9 a.m. the next morning, they said I could go home "as soon as the doctor makes his rounds and discharges me as I cannot be discharged until the doctor saw me." I hear this on about an hourly basis until 4 p.m., when they come in and said I was being discharged. Did I ever see the doctor? Hell, no. In the meantime, they have people in beds in the hallway because they don't have rooms available. Sheesh.
There's never any reason to wait all day to be discharged (unless perhaps you need the doctor to provide some Rx's upon discharge). I never do. You can leave any time you like; you'll just be marked as leaving AMA. I've done this numerous times. Or more accurately, I've threatened to do it numerous times; I believe that I've only had to follow-thru with my threat 2-3 times. Usually, I tell my nurse that I'm leaving at X time whether the doctor has been around or not, and miraculously, my discharge papers are completed just before my deadline.
On a related issue, most hospitals have a policy of having patients wait to be transported by wheelchair from their room to the front door of the hospital and this is another inconvenience by which I won't abide. I'll give Transport a reasonable time to show up (~15min), but if they haven't arrived by then, I just walk out of the room myself (assuming I'm able).
As a nurse I can tell you if we let you get your sleep and you dropped dead in the middle of the night, there'd be a lawsuit. Do you think we want to be waking cranky rude patients up at midnight and 4 am to take vitals? Hell no. But because we do, we find some people who need immediate intervention so they don't die. You're in the hospital to STAY ALIVE, not get "well", that's for home or outpatient rehab.
You're welcome.
PS... so glad I don't work in a hospital anymore thanks to ungrateful, know-it-all patients like so many on this thread...
I think most of these posters were just responding to the questions asked in the OP and would not express such "ingratitude"
about the things they listed. And many of the things they listed were likely tongue-in-cheek, because most people know why they are in the hospital and know it's necessarily not going to be a luxury stay at a 5 star resort. I know that's true in my case.
But while you mention it, I will add another item to my list. And that's having to deal with a health care worker with an attitude towards patients like yours. I'm glad you don't work in a hospital any longer either.
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