Your Degree vs My Life Experience (1/22/15)
I find it amazing how an experience can hijack your train of thought. There are so many other things I could be talking about, but after two trips to the ER that led to two hospital inpatient visits it seems healthcare is where my mind is focused.
For liability reasons my nurse was escorting me downstairs to my ride home after I was released from second visit. We were making small talk in the elevator when I asked, “How long have you been in the industry?”
“I’ve been practicing nursing for about eight years.”
“Well it looks like I’ve been in the industry longer than you’ve been practicing.”
It’s funny that I have never spent a day in med school, but I have accumulated enough life experience to go toe to toe with any medical professional and I know that I can win when I do.
It was about midnight on the third night of my second in patient visit when the alarm to my medical pump went off. I looked at the alarm code on the monitor, the level of fluid remaining in the IV, whether or not the tube to my arm was kinked and then finally at the connection site. It wasn’t until then that I finally hit the call button to have a nurse show up.
“What’s the problem?”
“My IV is obstructed, and the site needs to be changed.”
“How would you know that?”
“The obstruction alarm for the pump went off, the bag of saline is over two thirds full, there wasn’t a kink in the IV tubing, my left wrist is swollen two and a half times larger than my right wrist and it hurts like hell.”
On a scale of patients from 1 to 10 where 1 is a needy pathological liar who creates nothing, but problems for the medical staff and 10 is a person who never hits the nurse call button, I’m about a 9. I understand the medical staff has a really tough job so I try not to make it any harder. However, my practical knowledge can compete with their traditional education so I find it offensive when I’m patronized by a professional touting their book smarts.
I may not have all the answers but I have enough common sense and basic knowledge to know when someone is providing an ill-advised course of action.
“Have you spoken to your surgeon? You need to talk to your surgeon.”
“My surgeon was out of office (total b.s. cause I hadn’t called her), but I’m going to get in touch with her next week.”
I was admitted to the hospital the first time for extreme dehydration. The body didn’t have enough water in it and it was basically going through a complete shutdown. My blood pressure was jumping between normal and 230/180 and every muscle fiber was constricting simultaneously. If the EMTs hadn’t gotten an IV in my arm I think that my leg would have hyper-extended and broken under the force of my muscle fiber contractions.
When my colon was removed nearly 13 years ago I learned that the vast majority of the water you consume is absorbed by it, your GI track is where all of your nutrition and water is absorbed. In fact if you don’t have enough of your GI track you have to be fed intravenously by a tube.
So my problem was having a doctor try and force a short term solution, surgery, to one problem, a partial GI blockage, down my throat, and talking to me as if I didn’t have the mental capacity to grasp the current situation. Would surgery fix the GI problem? Possibly. No one can say for sure because I’m subject to other health conditions that could affect the results of surgery. However, if my original problem was water retention why would you adamantly promote a procedure that would exasperate that problem?
The part that amused me the most was when I did see a GI surgeon during that hospital visit. We talked for about 20 minutes and before he left he said, “Your problem will most likely correct itself on it’s own. I don’t need to be here, and hopefully you and I don’t have to see each other again.”
I’m not saying I have all the answers, but please don’t patronize me because you feel your degree is more valuable than my life experience.
