Monday, September 27, 2010

That's Scary!


Scary things happen at hospitals. Here’s one episode among many in the five days my son has been there.

This morning, there was a bag of iron hanging on the pole beside his bed. It was being delivered intravenously to his body. A nurse came in and said, "You're not supposed to be getting blood." My son said, "I'm not, it's iron." She said, "No, honey, that's blood." She removed it from the pole and left with it. A little later, another nurse came in, looked at the empty pole and said, "Where's your iron?" He said, "Another nurse took it." She shook her head, sighed loudly and stomped out, but came back later with another bag of iron and started all over again. It would be funny if it weren’t so scary!  

He went into this hospital on Wednesday evening. After checking his hemoglobin, they realized he was losing a lot of blood. So they started blood and plasma. Almost forty-eight hours and six units of blood later, when they saw that the hemoglobin hadn’t gone up, they finally got around to checking to see where the blood was coming from! The doctor admitted after two days and two Endoscopies that, when he found the ruptured artery, blood was “gushing!” Scary! He wasn’t really sure he had fixed it either because he had a surgeon standing by just in case.

They aren’t saying when my son will be released, but I hope it’s soon. He just may be better off at home taking care of himself than staying in a hospital where one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's hard to believe this could happen in a hospital. You should report it to someone who could do something about it.
Keep writing things like this to inform people.
I'll keep reading. I love the way you write.

Anonymous said...

Same thing happened to me -- only I had 12 pints of blood before they checked to see where it was coming from. Hospitals are awful places to be. You never know what will happen.

charlie@hotmail.com said...

Hospitals really are scary places. People die there but they save lives to.