10 Ways to improve the Post Op Experience
To all; I had way too much time to think about this, as I’m sure many of you have.
1) Each of the Nurses, or Nurses Assistant, etc. who enter the roomuses the the generic name of the drug, such as Plavix, etc., which the average non medical professional patient, in which I include myself, is not proficient. At this point, the Nurse, etc., might as well have been speaking in French, or Vulcan, etc.
Could they speak in our language?
2) My parting remark was that “I would of stayed longer but I needed sleep”
Patient sleep should have a higher priority or at least a priority. At least one night, there were 8 times that I counted being woken up. Though, to be fair, none of the nights were conducive to sleep, due to hearing beeping, conversations, moaning, and toilets flushing, among divers sounds.
3) Is there an Institutional Requirement that hospital food be uniformly unedible? Is this to keep malingerers from staying on? Can’t it be one level up from McDonalds?
4) At one point during my sojourn I stumbled out into the hallway and asked the Nurse DuJour if she would join me in a spin around the hallway. My recollection from a previous operation of the heart, is that the NDJ was supposed to ask me to start walking.
5) At one point, I woke up with what is medically called a Urethral Catheterization. Having had a nightmare about some emergency in the hospital requiring immediate evacuation (don’t ask-see various episodes of General Hospital), my request to the NDJ was for immediate removal of the offending UC. Upon refusal, I next asked the NDJ to speak to the Doctor in charge. If he (or she) refused, could they please come and explain the necessity to me. 20 minutes later, the offending device was removed.
6) The bathroom tissue was in a 3/4 closed container that kept responding directly to gravity. Eventually, the container was reversed so it could be of use. Told the NDJ not to report this again.
7) As someone who previously worked for a Bureaucracy and is always concerned about a lack of same, shouldn’t there be a person in charge of patient overview? Might that person introduce him or her self to the patient?
8) The day we left the hospital, it felt like an enormously cumbersome procedure (see above, the B word). Luckily, there was a wife with me who wanted me home, otherwise I might still be there. Outside of Insurance and Litigation, is there a reason for this procedure to be enormously cumbersome?
9) One Doctor came in to ask me if I required a prescription for Codeine something, aka an “Opiod” for my pain. My term was that these kind of pain relievers were “evil”. The person retreated wordlessly. Why was this kind of pain reliever even offered?
10) Is there ever a way to receive a list of all the medications received during a hospital stay? Since we are charged for these medications, there should be a record available to the patient.
11) Luckily, I had a support person, in my case a wife. I wondered how someone who came into this situation alone survived.
robertthesmall 