I believe I can have a new career if I want it. Over the last four months, I have received my medical education. I have learned how to do the following. I can flush a gastro 3 port tube. I can inflate a # 10 balloon in that same tube. I can flush a foley line. I can empty a foley. I can shut off and on the IV machines. I can drain and clean out open drain tubes and suction bulbs. I can clean and replace all bandages of varying sizes and purposes. I can teach RN’s how to unhook and reposition a colonoscopy bag clamp for either draining or expelling an inflated bag when not being used as for its original purpose. I understand the use of barrier creams and the applying of them. Of course, I’m an expert in the bed pan. I can identify blood pressure increasing due to increasing pain levels and I understand the readouts on monitoring systems. More importantly, I can remember doctors orders for medications their doses, purpose, and interactions.
Besides all that I had to understand the procedure my wife went through called a Whipple Procedure. It is considered one of the riskiest surgeries that one can have. The surgery itself can run between 8-12 hours depending on complications.Gaining and understanding of the digestive system, and how it’s been redirected helps in your ability to understand what a patient could be going through. Such as vomiting dark green foul/sweet-smelling bile. (No her head did not rotate around at any point)
On top of all of this add to it a patient that has a connective tissue disease, a degenerative disk disease and advanced arthritis in the spine.This is a person who in order to get through the day has to be always moving. Otherwise, a disk in the spine may begin to attach itself to another disk and begin squeezing some nerves that affect your ability to walk, or bend your legs or tell muscles to do what they are supposed to do. Now have that patient lay flat on a bed for 4 months. You will hear that patient ask you to kill them now. You will hear them ask god why do they have to suffer. You will hear them beg for relief. The worst part is this patient is allergic to most pain medications except for Fentanyl. Which is stronger than Morphine. If they take it they will begin hallucinating and or just sleep all the time and will not remember anything that happened previously and can’t be expected to really do anything but lie there and not heal but be a zombie or be in torturous pain.
So this has been part of my life for the last four months. If I hadn’t been there every day my wife would have been dead. I can’t tell you how many times they were about to give her the wrong medicine, or the wrong dose. Or give her something that could kill her like iodine. Or how many infections I stopped because they wouldn’t take the time to clean her wound site or flush her foley or drain her drains because in many cases they didn’t care, were too busy, didn’t have the knowledge or just have the opinion that all patients are the same and they should all get the same care.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the health care industry shouldn’t be profit driven. In many cases, nurses and aids can’t give you the care you need because there told by management to cut costs, have more patients per nurse, no overtime etc.Besides that nurses and doctors are being held more accountable and every step every action they take has to be recorded and measured. There to busy typing into the computer than looking at the patient. Their jobs have become not a caring job but an administrative paper pushing job that no one wants to do. Heaven help you if any of you or your loved ones have to go into the health care system and I pray that your family member will not be lost over the care they won’t receive.
I received a copy of the ambulance bill for moving my wife about 10-15 miles from one hospital to another $5800.00. I had been wondering if I should become an Uber driver to make ends meet financially but maybe I should start my own Ambulance company. How about “Uber Ambulance”!