16. Mental Illness Is Real, Y’all
“My father works in the ER of a major hospital in MA. One day they get a call to prep for a man with a pen in his eye. Usually no big deal except that this was a psych patient and he’s the one who put the pen there by holding it near his eye and running face first into a wall. Luckily it didn’t pentrate his brain but he was completely catatonic. Did not respond to anything but was completely awake.
My dad, fearing that there is nothing stopping this man from just shoving it the rest of the way in with his hand, restrains the man just in case. Surgery goes fine and they send him up to recovery. Sadly, as when many hospital accident occur, there was a shift change. The new shift didnt know to restrain the man and he ended up biting his finger off and wiping his blood on any person who came near, and when no one would approach him he would just fling his bloody stump around spraying blood everywhere.”
17. When The System Is Scarier Than The Injuries
“My worst hospital horror stories come from my mother, who was an RN for many years.
The first is that the hospital will happily lose incriminating documents, and it’s actually legal. Say for example you were that poor Orlando woman who after giving birth was told that she could either have all her limbs amputated or die. The hospital told her it was because she was diagnosed with a rare form of Strep A, when in fact it’s because the obstetrician prescribed an overdose of epinephrine during the birth and it caused her peripheral vascular system to clamp off until gangrene set in. Let’s say her lawyer walks into the front door, plunks down a subpoena, and walks out again. The hospital’s administrators, and nurses, will pull the woman’s file, go through it with any doctors who saw the woman, and destroy any parts of the file that may show any wrongdoing. Only then do they open the subpoena. If the subpoena ain’t open yet, the files are still technically the property of the hospital, and they’ll do what they want with them. And this shit is common knowledge.
The next worse thing is OR deaths. OR deaths aren’t common, but they still happen. What an OR team will typically do, if a patient is dead because it was a sudden injury or because someone fucked up, is wheel the patient out into the hall. That way it’s a post- or pre-op death. It’s not investigated by a medical examiner that way, and it doesn’t go against the surgeon’s numbers (surgeons have records indicating what deaths took place while under their knife, so they’ll do anything to pad their numbers and keep them looking spotless.) Also, in cases where a death occurred because of some blatant screw-up, after it’s reported, the surgical staff will repair the body so what exactly happened cannot be easily determined in the case of a medical examination. They then disappear. Any records indicating who was present are “lost,” and consequently rewritten to give an alibi to whatever medical personnel was most likely responsible for the death of a patient.
Basically, you’re more likely to fear a hospital’s medical staff than you are injuries or disease.”
via didyouknowfacts