ABUSE IN HOSPITALS

This page was last updated on Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Incident 1.  VA hospitals are usually associated with medical schools. I cannot say that they all are, just the ones about which I know. At these facilities, VA patients are often used in research and to train medical students, nurses, and doctors. In this way former military personnel continue to serve their country.

I have had several episodes with kidney stones over the years. The first occurred in 1978 and that was very painful. A painful episode occurred in December 1992 and the pain lasted into January 1993. The last episode of kidney stones occurred in October 1994 and that was not painful. I just felt terrible, sweaty, and nauseous. Physicians at the Martinez Veteran's Clinic realized that I had a kidney stone lodged in the left kidney.

In the first week of November 1994, physicians at Travis Air Force Base inserted a stent. This is a small tube that doctors pass through the urethra into the bladder, then into the left ureter, and up into the left kidney. The insertion was not painful because the medical team gave me a spinal injection. I was numb from the waist down.

While in bed, I had the urge to urinate but I could not get to the bathroom. So I pressed the call button and it did not work. I fell out of the bed while trying to reach the call button. There I was on the floor with the IV needle ripped from my arm. Shortly, another patient came into my room and called for a nurse.

She was really angry with me and used some coarse language. The problem was her neglect. The call button did not work and the bed rail was down. The IV was pumping me full of fluid and no one gave me a container to relieve myself. Noticing that other patients were watching this scene, the nurse 'got the picture'. A technician repaired the call button and was thoughtful enough to bring a television to my bedside.

Incident 2.  I had to wait almost three months before doctors could treat me for the kidney stone. The worse thing was that the stent was causing discomfort forcing to walk in a stooped position. Finally in January 1995, the VA admitted me to the VA Hospital at Palo Alto, California. They planned that I was to be admitted on a Thursday and released a few days later. It did not happen that way for physicians discovered that I had contracted a serious urinary tract infection. The medical staff had to treat the infection first before removing the stent six days later.

This is how it went. An attendant wheeled me down to a small room where a physician was waiting for me. I got on an imaging table that allowed the doctor to view the progress of the procedure. He then placed a tube in my urethra that grasped the end of the stent and slowly removed it. The stent was quite long and had several coils at the end that made for a strange and uncomfortable experience. After he removed the stent, the physician let me see it. The stent appeared mottled and discolored and this procedure was done without any pain killer or anesthesia. Doctors pulverized the kidney stone three days later.

Physicians call the procedure Extracorporeal Shockwave Lithotripsy. In this procedure, a mechanism creates shock waves outside the body. These shock waves travel through the body tissues until they hit kidney stones causing them to break down into tiny particles. These particles then easily pass through a urinary tract. Sometimes, a nurse will insert a catheter into the patient's bladder (an uncomfortable process) to catch the particles for laboratory analysis.

A nursed catheterized me and I was ready for the Lithotripsy. Another nurse helped me onto a table and then tried administer morphine. That is when we discovered that I was allergic to morphine. She then administered another drug to counteract its effect. I endured 3,000 shock waves over a period of fifty minutes without any pain killer or anesthesia. What the nurse called a 'spark plug' created these shock waves. I experienced little pain, at first, but as the device wore down, the shock waves became a little longer and much more intense. It felt like getting hit in the kidney with a baseball bat 3,000 times. The first 500 times were not so bad, it was the last 2,500 times that got my attention. The procedure was a success and from the x-ray films, I could see that 'spark plug' had pulverized the stone into a smoky cloud.

I decided to go for a walk later that evening. I checked out at the nurse's station. There I was in hospital pajamas and a robe towing an IV stand on wheels carrying an IV bag and the catheter bag - hardly a threatening or villainous sight. While on my way to snack room a female phlebotomist accosted me. She rammed me with her cart and angrily claimed, using vulgar language, that I was in a 'restricted area'. Then, she stomped off to complain to the ward nurse.

I was not in a restricted area. I was in a public hallway on my way to purchase some fruit juice from a dispensing machine. When I returned to the ward, I told a ward nurse of the incident - they already knew the phlebotomist's version. Later, several nurses came by and apologized for the woman's behavior.

Incident 3.  I had another episode (of many in my life) of rapid heartbeat (due to Wolfe-Parkinson-White disorder and atrial tachycardia) in the closing weeks of December 1996. I could not stop this one. We called an ambulance that took me to Sutter Solano Hospital in Vallejo California. The emergency physician treated me as best he could under the circumstances. Out of his sight, the nurses and technicians (three females) wrapped a blood pressure cuff around an IV needle in my arm. The result was that the needle punctured a vein causing excessive bleeding. This was done with malice for the other arm had nothing attached to it and the injury would not have occurred.

No one wants to be a patient in a hospital. Hospitals impose, by necessity, inconveniences and expose patients to infectious diseases and other perils. I see no reason for hospitals to tolerate negligence and abusive nurses and staff.

Edward S. Nunes