Confinement in the VA Hospital Part 2

http://vets.arizona.edu/clearinghouse/research.php

            Confinement: Day 1

           I was awoken this morning at 3:30am by someone who needed to draw blood. I guess you can't really say they woke me up; I didn't get much sleep due to the amount of pain that I was in and a doctor that I had yet to meet felt the need to prescribe an extremely low dose of IV pain meds and spaced the dosing out by three hours. So not only did the drug barely touch the pain, but it wore off three hours before I could receive more. I had just about fallen back to sleep, when the nurse's aid showed up to take my vitals. For whatever reason it had to be right at 5:30 in the morning. This was so important that it couldn't wait the half hour until I was to receive my next dose of supposed pain killers.
   
         At about 8am the day nurse came in wearing her hazmat suit to bring me breakfast. I love breakfast. Today, I hate breakfast. It's milk, pineapple juice, one runny scrambled low cholesterol egg, soggy bread that they hope I will confuse with toast, and plain oatmeal; they couldn't even give me sugar to put in it. And for some reason it specifies that I cannot have coffee. I was very confused by this, can people with TB not have coffee? At least I had pineapple juice.

        I'm not even going to talk about their feeble attempt at lunch and dinner. Let's just say, I didn't get pineapple juice.And no one had figured out yet, why I couldn't have coffee. I checked, and none of the doctors had enacted a coffee embargo. The only thing I could think of was that after my last surgery I was severely tachycardic and I had asked them to stop giving me coffee since I wanted to drink it, but it probably would have made my heart explode. I asked if someone could call down and find out if this was the case, but still no one seemed to know, although, to be fair, I don't think anyone actually called down to the dietician to ask.

       When the night shift came on, I was relieved. I had a different nurse tonight, and not only did she seem competent, but she also seemed to care. When I asked her if they could raise the amount of IV dilaudid that I was receiving, she called up the on call docs right away. She could tell that I was in an incredible amount of pain. The doctor agreed to give me a higher dose, but now instead of three hours between doses, I had to wait four. This was actually worse, the medication wears off in about an hour and now I had to wait three hours from when the pain returned to get another injection. This is a big problem; anyone who has had severe pain before will tell you, you have to stay ahead of the pain. If you get behind it, the amount of drugs that it takes to reduce the pain ends up being so much that you are just a drooling idiot. Oh, and these doctors of course had not so much as talked to me yet, nor had they bothered to take a look at my file. 

       The weird thing about this situation is that the on call docs refused to tell the nurse who their supervising doctor was that evening. I guess they didn't want their orders questioned by a nurse. The nurse was finally able to get a hold of the doctor that was in charge that evening and they were able to get my pain meds sorted out so that I would get at least some sleep. Thank God for small favors.

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