If You Don't Care....

We have another frequent flyer (read about some others here, here and here). Shocking I know. It seems that when one disappears (dies, moves, is sent to jail) another one appears. Some houses just generate a lot of calls throughout the years. The people living there are in poor health so we go a lot. This was the case for our new frequent flyers. Except they've moved on from calling once every few months to calling 6 times in the last week.

In the last 4 days I've worked this lady had called four times. One time each day. Each time she had complained of pain around her kidneys. The first time we started our assessment but AMR showed up before we got too far into it. We got her on the way to the hospital quickly and I assume the medic on the ambulance took care of pain management.

The next day she called again. I asked if she felt the same as the day before and she said yes. I asked what had been done in the ER and she didn't know. All she knew was they sent her to get her blood drawn at the lab and now she was waiting for the results and she had a script for Vocodin. AMR was Johnny on the spot this time as well and we shipped her off to the hospital rather quickly.

While I was off for the next 4 days she called twice.

Then I came back and started my shift with a call from her. This time the pain was the same. All the answers to the pertinent questions were the same. She still didn't know what was going on. This time she did have her lab results and she said that she was waiting for her Dr. appointment to go over the results with him/her.

The last time she called was the most interesting. This time her son was there. He, assuming I didn't speak Spanish, proceeded to tell me what was wrong with his mom. He said she had a seizure. She denied this. He said she was throwing up. She denied this too. She did say that her lungs hurt in addition to the kidney pain.

Before I could get any further the son said that his mom had had surgery on her stomach last week.

HUH!?!

I asked my patient and she confirmed it. So I asked what type of surgery. No one knew. I asked what it was on and no one knew. I asked if they took something out and again, no one knew. The patient now said that her incision site was bothering her.

And in walked the AMR medic. Thankfully it was one that had been here before. I asked her if she knew about the surgery. She didn't. So I wasn't the only one kept out of the loop on that one. So we loaded her up and sent her off to hospital again. We'll see what happens this time.

My question is how do you let someone slice you open without knowing the reason. How was this surgery going to fix whatever problem she had? I mean if you don't care enough to know what the MD is doing to your body who will?