Hospitals Are Strange Places

I have been spending a lot of time at the hospital lately. Daily visits for 2 weeks. I have decided that they run just as strange as most everywhere else. This has not been a happy discovery for me.

My Uncle has been in a hospital over 2 weeks now. He is slowly getting better and we hope will only be there another week or so. The thing is, I’m starting to wonder if he could have already been well enough to leave.

These days being a Doctor doesn’t always mean what it once did. The modern Doctor a lot of times is a specialist of some kind. During this past few weeks I’ve met a lung specialist, a heart specialist, a kidney specialist, a digestive specialist, and the strangest one (person) was the dietician. There was a different kind of bird. With all these specialists you would think my Uncle was in the best of care. The problem is that all these guys are great at what they do, but they are terrible at communicating between themselves.

For example, one Doctor had my Uncle on some kind of IV for adding sugar to his system. It made his blood sugar way too high, so another Doctor was having the nurses give him Insulin to bring it down. The heart Doctor had him on some kind of medicine designed to ‘protect his heart’, whatever that was supposed to mean. The result was that his blood pressure was dangerously low, to the point where the nurses were panicking. Another Doctor read the blood pressure reports and immediately stopped that medicine.

Yesterday they added some kind of IV for raising his sodium levels. Another Doctor had been pumping his system full of liquids which had been lowering his sodium levels. He is now on restricted liquid intake to better control the sodium levels.

I just don’t think these Doctors ever compare notes. They just do whatever they think is OK and even if they cross medicate the patient. It would seem to me they would want to know the total picture.

The Nurses are the only ones who seem to know what will happen when a new directive comes down from one of the specialists. They have the direct experience with the patients and see the results of all this non-communication. Usually they will say things like “I tried to tell Doc So & So that this wasn’t something that sounded right to me, but….” Of course, a Doctor will rarely listen to a nurse’s opinion. They don’t even want to hear other Doctors opinions.

Yep, I wonder if my Uncle would have been out by now without all the cross medicating he’s been getting. Yesterday he was much better than he’s been since he got there. This is a result of having no medication for 2 days and only the intravenous food thing and the IV for sodium going. His blood pressure is now normal and he has an appetite and a lot of energy. These things are all new since stopping the medications. (They were only stopped because his blood pressure got to ‘should be dead’ levels and they couldn’t fix it.)


Maybe ‘Communication With Other Doctors 101’ should be a required class in Doctor School? I think so.