My Worst Hospital Visit Ever

It is not in my nature to complain much and, were there not a call for this content, I probably would not have bothered with this article. On the other hand, it does shed some light on the vast divergence of quality we find in the area of medical care and underscores the point that, however the powers-that-be may want to change the nature of care in this nation, we must always have the option to choose our own doctors, whenever possible.

On the positive side, I have, over the course of time, assembled an excellent list of specialists, topped off by my wonderful primary care doctor, of whom I wrote earlier in an article titled My Excellent Doctor . You may want to give it a look, particularly if you live in the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area.

On the other hand, when you find yourself in the emergency room of a hospital, you have no choice as to the doctor you get as your first point of contact. Yes, yes, I know that emergency care can be a thankless chore, but I have seen it and experienced it done well too many times to overlook the stupid and the sloppy in terms of care.

Like all my other visits to the ER, ever since I cut my hand open at the age of eight, this one involved my kidneys. I have had more kidney stones than some people have had colds. They are, as anyone who has known the joy of one can verify, no damn fun at all.

On the whole, most of my kidney stone episodes were handled well and effectively. The concept of happiness can be a relative thing, of course, but there is little in this world that can match the joy of lying on a gurney, shot full of industrial-strength Dilaudid, after you have been in excruciating kidney pain for what seemed an eternity.

During one particularly bad stone episode, I needed to stay in the hospital overnight and get two doses of Dilaudid to keep the pain at bay. After she hooked the second dose up to my IV, the nurse explained to me that, if I needed a third, it would be in the form of an inter-muscular injection into the hip.

"Why go through all that, when I'm already hooked up?" I asked her.

"We don't want you getting too fond of the drug," she explained.

No, that was not my worst experience in a hospital at all. As it turned out, I did not need a third dose. The really bad one came in 2005, when my problems had escalated from kidney stones to outright renal failure.

As I said, I have had many of these things and, after a time, they almost always pass. Almost, that is, but not entirely, as it turned out. At some point a stone in my right kidney had failed to pass and, as a result, blocked the flow from that organ. Because I still had another functioning kidney, I failed to notice anything was amiss.

In the spring of 2005, I finished performing in a high-energy show called Kiss of the Spider Woman. The show closed on a Saturday night. We struck the set, celebrated by throwing down some beer, and went our merry ways. That following Monday morning, I suddenly realized that I had not urinated at all since some time the previous Saturday evening. Even so, there was no pressure whatsoever on my bladder.

I got myself to the closest ER and, after a short enough time to fix the problem, a stent had been inserted to open up my left kidney. The right one, which had been blocked for who-knows-how-long, had atrophied.

The doctor who inserted the stent warned that this was probably only a stop-gap solution, and, sure enough, the device failed even faster than he had foreseen. Once more, I hastened back to that same ER. Since I knew what had happened, I refrained from taking that swallow of water I so desperately wanted as I was starting off to the hospital. By the time I got there, I was thirstier than I could ever remember being.

When I got there, the ER doctor made two decisions I truly resented. The first was to put me on a "nil by mouth" status, as horribly thirsty as I was. The second was to insert a Foley catheter into me, which was very painful and completely unnecessary.

After a great deal of outright begging, I finally got his consent to have a last glass of water, but I could not make any headway on the catheter issue. Never mind that, by the nature of my ailment, my bladder was empty, in went the catheter.

The Foley catheter, which, for those of you who may not know, is inserted into a man's penis, was still in its useless place when I underwent my procedure for a nephritic catheter. This is a device that serves the same purpose of draining urine from the body, but it is inserted directly into the kidney, and under sedation. The trouble was, in order for the doctor to do so, I had to lie on my stomach-the very last position you want to be in when you have an irritating device stuck into your penis. I probably needed the sedation for that as much as for having a sharp object stuck into my kidney.

To top it all off, I had to beg and beg some more to have the chance to take a shower, after four days among the great unwashed. I suppose in ancient times, such an interval was no big deal, but, these days, it is.

Fortunately, at some point a bit later, my own quite competent urologist did a follow-up operation that fixed the problem and saved the kidney. This was an operation by appointment, rather than an ER visit, so I was able to get taken care of by someone who knew what he was doing, not some chucklehead who didn't know from Shinola.

Emergency medicine is a vitally necessary component of our healthcare. I do not mean to run it down in its entirety. Still, there is no doubt, that one particular visit I described was a nightmare that need not have happened.

Sources

Own experience