I took my mom back into St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto yet again at about 7:30 am on Monday August 4th. She was in delirium and had fallen out of bed. She spent all day and into the evening in the emerg waiting for a room to come available on the General Medicine floor. The 14th floor where nothing ever goes well for her. :-( (other than the last visit). The problems started immediately.
She needs a sitter because she is in an unsafe, unstable condition. She tries to get out of bed due to delirium and is seeing things thanks to an infection. So they put her in a room with 2 other patients. Both of which are men. The one beside her is fine.. however.. the one across from her looks like he's in a serious detox and likes to lay there with nothing on but a diaper and touching/rubbing it or spreading his legs. Oh yeah, if you go back in this blog you'll see this kind of thing is the norm at this hospital, not the exception. Needless to say, my mom is very upset and he scares her. Scares me a bit too the way he looks. All red in the face, hair all greasy and stringy and nothing he is saying is making any sense.
The sitter she has is yet another matter. Male as well but that means squat. They have some very good male sitters but this one is something else. They need to take my mom to get a ct scan of her head to be sure she didn't hit it and there's no problems so this guy grabs the gurney and slams it into her bed jarring the hell out of her and making her cry out in pain and start to cry. He's certainly got my attention now. Mr. Expose Himself is now attentive too. Then what does this sitter do? Well he needs to move her from the bed to the stretcher so he whips off her sheets leaving her pretty much exposed to Mr. Expose Himself! Now she's freaking out laying there in nothing much more than a little t-shirt and her drapes wide open and this asshole doesn't give a rat's ass. I jump in at this point and yell for him to give her a bit of respect and decency and shut the damn drapes. He smirks, gives me a look as if to tell me to fuck off and proceeds to drag her onto the stretcher. I run up, grab one drape as another c.a. grabs one too and we pull them shut.
They take her down for a ct scan and I go head hunting for that bastards head. I tell them that the guy is exposing himself and what the sitter did and I wanted her moved from there. I want them both away from her. Then I'm told that they can't!! They can't afford a sitter to sit with just her so if I want her moved then they will however she won't have a sitter for her protection/safety! oh.. but Mr. Expose Himself will have one?? Absolutely!
Their end result to fix this issue is to have Mr. Expose Himself pull his drapes and to change the sitter with another one. The sitter solution was fine by me but every time someone pulled that pigs drapes he pulled them back! That's quite the solution St. Mikes... quite the solution. Now my elderly mom is terrorized by this pig.
"Urban Angel" my ass.. more like the "Devil's Den"
I would take her elsewhere but the problem with that is her family Dr who is simply amazing is with that hospital. Her cardiologist who is also amazing is there too. Her tummy Dr that she's had for 17 years now and knows her literally inside and out.. is also there, as is her arthritis specialist. So.. with that being said, every test, every scan, every scope, every x-ray, every I.N.R., every everything she's had done to her since they closed the beloved Wellesley Hospital is right there at a Dr's fingertips to see. No second guessing, no 50,000 questions, all the answers to their questions are right there in front of them. This isn't available other places. And it can make a difference in her care, especially in the emerg who for the most part, work great. It's once you get upstairs to that general medicine ward that will kill you. Or scar you psychologically for life.
Right now I'm limited with time due to my mom's illness thanks to 2 Dr's at St. Michael's hospital. Dr. Jennifer Watts and Dr. D'Silva, both of the Geriatric dept in there. Don't know D'Silva's first name however I'm sure there aren't too many Dr. D'Sillva's on the Geriatric team during this time period. Young woman. Anyway, don't ever let either one of them touch your loved one. You'll be lucky they don't kill them. If I wasn't there constantly and overseeing most everything I don't believe I would have brought my mom home. What's worse, they wouldn't listen to their patient when she told them not to do something, and not to change her meds. Then they wouldn't listen to me as her Power of Attorney so the long and short of it is this...
1) They took her off her Diltiazem (her heart med) and she was tachycardic twice. Enough to put her on fluids to settle everything down including her blood pressure because that med also regulated her blood pressure.
2) They jacked up her other 2 blood pressure pills because of course they removed her heart med that helped regulate it.
3) They took her off her Lasix (her water pill) and after giving her bolus (large amounts of fluids fast) twice she then had a crackle in her lung which meant there could very well be fluid there. When I got her home her one ankle was swollen one morning and she had fluid filled bags under her eyes and still did by the Friday when I took her to her family Dr.
4) They removed her domperidone for her swallowing issues and in little time it was more difficult for her to swallow too. This means since she's on a liquid diet due to swallowing issues, she's getting less and less calories as time goes one. She definitely lost weight again in there.
5) They removed her from her iron even though her iron was low.
6) They removed her from her pain medications even though we told them not to. They put her on a different one that she can tolerate at very low doses (1 mg) however they were pumping her full of the shit and she simply curled up crying in constant pain and saying she wanted to die. At times she was fairly unresponsive.
7) When I finally lost it on Watt and wrote a letter to her boss D'Silva telling her I wanted Watt to have nothing to do with my mom's care, not to even have consulting privileges didn't D'Silva step in and start bullshitting us too and damn near overdosed her again. This time she said she would agree to putting her back on her old pain meds so she could get some relief and the minute I left the hospital, she cut it back in half and I found this out via the nurse. Next day I took it up with them again and again they said they would start her back on her old pain meds and again reversed it when I left and only gave her one dose for the entire day and only gave her a minimum dose at that. I told them I wanted it started back slowly and each day to add a bit more until we got her back on track but nope.. they'd rather see her suffer. I knew this was a safe way to do it because I spoke to a pharmacist that was well acquainted with my mom and he told me how to do it safely. In the end she was only getting 30 mg of codeine once a day there for a couple of lousy days, in excruciating pain because of it and then this dumbass Dr comes up with pumping 60 mgs all at once into her? Oh goodie, let's just kill her off. The 60 mg's never happened, I wouldn't allow it no matter what.
Something else bizarre happened too and I'm sure it's in regards to those meds they kept pumping into her that were doing nothing but putting her out in some zone never mind even on the planet... on the Saturday she was there she saw yet another Dr. A young man, very nice. While he was talking to me and her (although she wasn't really listening) her jaw started to chatter for lack of a better description. Like someone freezing cold. I never saw anything like that before and told the Dr to look at her. I asked him why it was happening and she's never done that and he didn't know. I'm no Dr but I'm putting it down to the overload of that freakin hydromorphone. At this point in time she was on 3 mg slow acting and throughout a few hours another 5 mgs @ 1 mg per hour. No wonder she didn't know where the hell she was and her jaw was jiggling.
8) Meanwhile Monday morning my mom was complaining that it burned when she peed so this means that the infection was still there and more so so I let them know. For some reason, probably because D'Silva was tired of me, we got a new young Dr who was amazing. She not only ordered a urine test on my mom, she also ordered an x-ray of her lungs since she also heard a crackle in there that she normally doesn't have. Seems D'Silva heard it the day before but chose to ignore that as well.
9) All along my mom had been delusional as well due to the infection but between Watt's and D'Silva it simply didn't matter. It's normal. On my mom's last day there she was even combative and I told D'Silva who reappeared that morning because she wanted my mom out of the hospital regardless of what else was going on. So that morning she was seeing pink turtles on her bed. Little bitty ones. She had not slept one night since she got there which wasn't helping the confusion. It burned when she peed. Her lung had a crackle and she had turned combative but she was going home. And she was in more pain than ever because she wasn't getting proper pain control for a week now. Exactly how long do they think an 88 yr old little lady can tolerate full blown pain?
10) D'Silva called a transport ambulance for her and ordered Cipro for my mom. Even though I had told her that at times it has not worked for my mom. She was so freakin eager to get rid of this little old lady who was now sicker than when she went in there that she didn't even bother to wait for the 2nd part of the test. The "sensitivity" test. This part tells you basically what kind of anti-biotic to use for that particular kind of bacteria. So she just shoves her on Cipro and ships her home @ 1 pm on Tuesday August 12th barely able to smile when she got home .
While home I know something isn't working... my mom is getting sicker. And more hallucinations too. That night she was seeing all sorts of things. People in her room that either owed her $150 or wanted $150. Things on the wall. Mumbling and muttering that I couldn't make any sense of. But of course, we have to remember that all this shit is alright according to Watts & D'Silva. She tries to get out of bed which is nothing short of frightening because she can't walk and will fall again and possibly this time seriously hurt herself. Even her sitter is scared.
I call her family Dr's nurse and leave a message telling her what is going on and Wednesday evening about 9 pm her Dr called me to discuss it. I told him she's getting worse instead of better and as I started to tell him that D'Silva shoved her out the door with Cipro without waiting for the sensitivity test he told me he knew and that's another reason why he's calling, the bacteria isn't sensitive to Cipro, she's on a drug that is doing nothing for her!! He then faxed that night a new prescription for a new antibiotic for her which she started Thursday around noon.
By now though things are not looking good. I take her into our family Dr on Friday afternoon and he's rather dismayed at how she looks. Her bp is ok but not like it normally is. Due to the fact she's not her normal perky self and is barely holding herself up in her wheelchair, she looks pale, guant and is crying at times, he doesn't want to do anything with her meds other than her pain meds for some relief. I have to call him Monday morning again.
All day yesterday and last night she was just laying there.. barely lucid it seemed at times. I was so worried I took her bp and then called the family Dr's service to speak to the Dr on call. Her bp was up and he had me push her back and she was tender. If she has a kidney infection now due to all of this I'll do something even if it's only blog and blog again about those 2 Dr's to save some other family's loved one from their reaches.
Suing isn't an answer. No lawyer out there will take on a case with an elderly person in bad health. A lawyer literally told me this a couple of years ago when I contacted lawyers about my mom and that damn place. He actually told me that no one would take her case because they were afraid that 2 years down the line when the case finally got to court that she would pass away and no one would be able to cover their fee's at that point! I told him that's illegal.. it's ageism... he said that's true but that's why no one would take her case. Listen.. if those asses did it 4 years ago when she had a clear cut case with them the case would be over and done and she would have won I'm sure.
Further to all this.. let me tell you, that before she got the urinary infection that sent her to the hospital this time, for years now her blood pressure has been right on.. her A-Fib has been so well controlled that it is almost undetectable... she had no swelling.. and when her family Dr gave her meds for a urinary infection he always waited for BOTH tests to come back.
It's Sunday August 17th, 2014 and I'm worried that I am going to have to take her back to the hospital. She woke up a bit more alert this morning and took her meds but in the last couple of hours she is waning agqin. I just asked her her name and she couldn't tell me. She is looking sick again. If I take her back I absolutely refuse to let Geriatric's touch her.
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