Sunday night-or rather the wee hours of Monday morning were spent in the emergency room. Jason gets severe gastroenteritis occasionally and we have to head to the emergency room for a shot of morphine and anti nausea medicine. Here's how it usually goes:
10:00 p.m. Everything seems normal. We go to bed.
11:00 p.m. I'm drifting off to sleep and a child comes into my room. For some reason they always come to my side of the bed. I let him/her into my bed for about 10 minutes and then put him/her back into their own bed.
12:00 a.m. The fun begins.
It used to be that he would suffer all night long and then around 6 we would give up and go into the emergency room. (A doctor, we have found, prescribes oral medication that is just impossible to keep down.) Now we realize what it is immediately and head to the hospital as soon as possible to try to stop the madness before it can really begin. There's only ONE problem. Doctors never seem to believe us. You would think that they would have previous charts showing that, yes, he came in six months ago and yes, it really was what he said it was, and YES, he really did need the meds.
Now come on. Really? Is there not a doctor in the whole world who believes a patient can FEEL his/her own body? Really?!! When we get there, Jason is usually in so much pain, he can barely talk. So I try to tell them everything. They look at me like I'm an idiot, ignore me and try to get Jason talking as he's gasping for breath through the pain. Then comes the really fun part. The doctor always comes and starts pushing down HARD on his stomach. I mean honestly?!! It's never done gently. What do they think will happen next? Well it always does.
After the pain is maximized by the prodding and poking, they give Jas a minimal dose of pain medication and tell him he's going to be fine. Four hours later, and 5 more injections of pain medication, anti-nausea meds, and a bag or two of saline to replace fluids, we head home. I think the doctor believes us now...but his shift is over so it's a moot point anyway. This time around he only lost 15 pounds in 2 days, but who says he's sick, right?
P.S. I feel after this post I must give a shout out to the great nurses. They were really good. In Jason's dillusional state (uh-huh) he even let me know that the first one was really cute. grrr.... She was. And she also did a really great job taking care of us.
2 comments:
That sounds awful! I'm so sorry you have to go through that, especially as often as you do! I gotta say though, I'd never want to be an ER doctor. When Matt got hit by the truck, we spent a lot of time in the ER and there were some seriously crazy people who came into the ER. Too bad their decisions make miserable situations more miserable for the rest of us!
That's frustrating! You may be able to avoid the medical record problem by setting up a Google Health profile (https://www.google.com/health) for Jason and using one of their affiliate services (try NoMoreClipboard.com) to deliver the records to the ER electronically. You could possibly even send his records over while you're on the way to the hospital. (These are all new services and are, drum roll, no charge!)
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