In Santa Monica, California Lawrence and Diana Exter’s lived a very quiet life. Since Diana is pregnant and expecting any day now they decide to do a little baby shopping at Yoosie Yander Baby Shoppe. There they stocked up on diapers and formula spending about $48.50. Three days later on September 2, 1903 she went into labor for 13hours giving birth to a baby boy named Lawrence Exter Jr. For that they gave the hospital a co-payment of $100. They took the baby home that week and loved being new parents, but one month later Lawrence Jr. became very ill. He had caught the flu and was in the hospital for two weeks. That resulted in them paying $475.00 to Dr. David M. McCoy. After going home they lived a great life still adjusting to being parents.…
He is dumbfounded that this sort of situation could happen to one of his patients and blatantly blames the nurses. He questions their intelligence, asking how they did not know that the girl’s parents are divorced and only the mother has custody. The father is not allowed to take his daughter due to legal rights, and big legal issues are involved with inattentive behavior. Dr. Munoz is the number one ENT for outpatient surgeries at Nightingale and is afraid that with his neck on the line for this casualty, he will lose credibility. Surgeons are responsible for the medical operation itself, as well as making sure the patient gets from pre-operative care to surgery to post-operative care safely. In these regards, Dr. Munoz did his job, but is still unhappy with the negligence of the nursing staff. His office notes state who the custodial parent is, but the staff did not ask for his notes. One way of avoiding this mess and covering his tracks would be to make certain that all notes taken by all medical personnel are transferred onto the patient’s record so there is no…
As Susannah’s story revealed, even medical professionals may not be as mindful as we hoped. The nurse’s statement cannot be justified as it is disrespectful to Susannah and her caretakers. It pained me when I read how Dr. Bailey kept insisting on his initial diagnosis.…
Last week, I described an article by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website titled Tootsie’s Story: Medical Error Takes a Life (http://www.rwjf.org/en/culture-of-health/2013/02/tootsie_s_story_med.html).…
During January in 200 Josie King was taken to John’s Hopkins hospital after suffering first and second degree burns from a hot bath. She was 18 months old and had a long life ahead of her. After being admitted to the PICU Josie was healing well and seemed like she would be released home soon. After being transferred out of the PICU Josie’s mother Sorrell began to worry. Sorrell knew something was different about her daughter and that she seemed dehydrated and needed water. After consulting with multiple nurses Josie’s mother was told not to give the small child anything to drink and that her vitals were perfectly normal. After being reassured many times Sorrell went home to get some well-needed sleep. Returning back to the hospital at 5:30 that next morning the mother’s instinct had been right. Josie’s mother screamed for doctors because she knew something was extremely wrong just by the way Josie looked. The doctors administered Narcan quickly and Josie was then allowed to drink some…
“What is your most memorable experience from your job?”, I asked Julie Barth, hoping to a hear a strange, intriguing story. “Well”, she says, “My most memorable experience was when I delivered a baby in the elevator, while we were transferring the mother to another room.” (Barth). Julie has had many memorable experiences helping patients, some better than others, and will continue to have many more. During an interview she stated that delivering a baby in the elevator, was the most memorable experience from her job, which would be very memorable for anyone. Julie Barth, the House Supervisor at Pekin Hospital, believes that her job is a hectic, but wonderful job, because she gets to help patients that are going through tough times, deals with…
For instance, when their daughter, Denise, who reads many academic medical texts, recommends them to give Wilder some medication and send him to bed, Jack and Babette ignore her idea and take the boy to the doctor’s office anyway. In the end, the doctor tells the couple that their daughter was right and that a simple aspirin would calm the boy down. Furthermore, when the physician asks Babette why she ignored her own daughter’s advice, she answered with, “She’s a child, not a doctor- that’s why” (DeLillo, 90). Although, Denise’s advice was rational and Wilder’s problem was simply something minor, Jack and Babette still need to hear the advice from someone with more experience in medicine and, most importantly, someone with more authority before they are able to trust their daughter’s…
“He slides his blade across my taut muscle like a bow to a violin. Please don’t do this to me. He has broken the seal of my body. Blood flows from the slit and rushes; staining, screaming across the cool white sheet. My mother is making it up.” This is Julie Gregory’s first-hand account of a surgery that her mother forced her to have, to find a heart condition that didn’t exist. Julie was abused by her mother throughout her life through social deprivation, nutritional and medical neglect, emotional and physical abuse. All due to her mother’s Munchausen’s by Proxy, a form of mental disorder and child abuse characterized by repeated visits to the doctor because of symptoms that were either intentionally caused by her mother, or completely fabricated. The idea of intentionally causing harm to your child is unfathomable to most parents; parents spend most of their time trying to keep their children out of harm’s way in any way possible, not purposefully hurting them. However, Julie’s mother would intentionally keep her out of school to see specialists, force her to have unnecessary, painful procedures, and try every…
Today I recorded a video with Rita Ganong as she described her interactions with a healthcare provider and what proved to be challenging for her. She was referred by a friend to a Physician for a consultation for a procedure she was scheduled for in the near future. She set up her appointed and was advised to arrive 15 minutes early. Upon her arrival to the Physician’s office, she went to open the door and the door was locked. She rang the bell and waited 15 minutes. She realized after waiting over a period of time, the office was closed. She was completed frustrated after rearranging her schedule and leaving work early with the expectation of having her consultation.…
1. The abuses at Bainbridge Hospital reflected a broken system at that time. Any person who was deemed untreatable was put into a “garden”- where people were treated like flowers that were simply “watered” and “fed” every day. The attitude of the people who worked at the institution was of people who had accepted the system’s failures as a way of life; they did not strive for change, they simply “went with the flow.” Dr. Sayer introduces a number of attitudes that can be seen in modern care facilities. For example, his unfailing persistence in not giving up on patients who he believed had a chance at life. These patients had been immobile for decades, with countless people telling him that they would never get better. By believing in their cognizance and their persistent awareness of their surroundings, Dr. Sayer creates the hospital environment of today, punctuated with the idea that all patients should have the chance to have the best chance in life. He never gave up hope. However, Dr. Sayer also faced many different obstacles in attempting to treat his patients. For example, he needed to first overcome the mockery of his fellow coworkers. The doctors and nurses who worked with him did not understand his desires to pursue what seemed like a meaningless waste of time. However, in doing so, he gave life back to people who would have otherwise been trapped forever, in a state of permanent limbo. Later, he also faced the crisis of dosage with his “patient zero”, Leonard. Would he cross the line and illegally dose Leonard without the consent of the pharmacist? In doing so, he achieved success. However, he had to do so by compromising the laws set by society. Moreover, he had to muster funding for the drug for all the patients that had been affected at the institution. He could have given up after the head of the hospital told him that it was simply too much money, but he persisted in his efforts and was rewarded with enough funding for…
article out with her own experience while she was trying to find a new primary-care doctor. She tells how she felt when this doctor first came in and what she noticed…
Ethical, moral, and even spiritual values inform nursing practice in a labor and delivery setting. A common nursing value, for example, is the emphasis on improving the quality of life’s experiences rather than simply “fixing problems” from a strictly medical perspective. This can have major implications for how the birthing experience is approached before, during, and after the actual period of labor and delivery, and places both the patient and the nurse in a much different total context than one that is simply medical. Besides, as a labor and delivery nurse, we also serve as patient advocates, which is enhanced by our cumulative knowledge gathered through years of experience. As educators, we normalized the birth experience and served as coach for the patient, her partner, and family members as both interpreters of medical information and procedures, as well as, providing advice that assisted in normalizing the birth experience. Other values can have equally important implications for how the nurse perceives and approaches her work, and simply having values implies a level of importance and respect that is brought to nursing practice that is not always present.…
Once again, I found myself wandering through the uncomfortable, brightly lit halls of the hospital. I was to find the room where my father was, an all too familiar task. "Room 443", I was told by my mother who had requested me to take my dad back to his apartment. Upon entering the elevator I let out a sigh of apprehension and turned to wearily push the button labeled "4". Whiffs of disinfectant products meandered themselves inside my nose while I looked around to see egg-white walls and nurses shuffling about in their bright, floral print scrubs. One of them approached me with a kind smile. "May I help you?" I briefly responded saying I needed to find my father, Charles Jolitz. "Go down the hall. He's in the last room on the left." Slowly making my way to the door, I speculated about what had happened to my dad this time. I entered the room thinking to myself, "Boy, he looks worse every time.", his salt and pepper hair ruffled, beard unshaven and a look of loss on his face. Though as soon as his eyes met mine, that face lit up and the corners of his mouth upturned into a smile. "My chickadee!", he exclaimed. I asked him how he was feeling and if it was time to go as the nurse carted in a wheelchair. All three of us made our way down to the lobby exchanging small talk. I dashed to my car, happy to be out of the dreariness that is a hospital. I hoped he would tell me why he was there yet again. Once in the car, he told me in a few words that he had had another episode due to taking his pain medication with a fifth of vodka and had lost control. He ended up dialing 911. My dad hurriedly changed the subject asking if I was hungry and if I would like to go have a burger. I let out another sigh. "I'm sorry, Dad. I'm not hungry, I've already eaten but I can take you to get one. We can go for lunch later this week." "Alright, sweetie.", said he. We arrived at his apartment complex and I walked him to his…
They obviously feel sympathy towards their child as well as worried at the fact that their child could possibly die. The emotion invoked in the parent of a child cannot be felt by a doctor that is not emotionally connected to that child. This is why the doctor could never get the same response from the readers as a parent telling the story could. Since it is not told from their point of view I instead have feelings of anger towards both parents for not helping the doctor out more and for the father just becoming angry and ordering his wife to get out since she clearly was not helping. If they had told the story it would have been obvious that they knew their daughter and they were hurting from not knowing what was wrong with her, as any parent would most likely feel in this situation. Where the doctor made it seem as if the parents were not at all helping, if told from their point of view it may seem the exact opposite. That in fact they were doing all the hard work and the way the doctor was acting was what was making their daughter unwilling. There is no possible way to know, however, since it is not told from the perspective of the…
I am one in five million who were coaxed into being with second opinions and hormone injections and countless blood samples. My father was the man who learned how to give those injections. To learn how, he stabbed an orange. My father stabbed an orange, puncture after puncture, and learned how to make them swift and direct. Puncture after puncture, and juice would well up in the holes and spill out. My father would avoid imagining how blood would well up in the holes and spill out when it was my mother 's thigh and not the orange. My father would avoid imagining the grinding of gears within her as natural cycles were brought to a halt. The cycle of injections and waiting and pain and embraces and exam rooms rolled onward. These were not the first injections; it was not the final pain.…