this last weekend was one for the record books: seizure on the train, trips to the emergency room, breakdowns over childcare, hospital transfers, more cancerous growth.
j had a seizure on the F train and when he came to he was an ambulance being taken to my new most-hated hospital, st. vincent's. he spent over 12 hours in their er, while they were doing the paperwork to get him transferred to sloan, a request i made at about hour 2 of the 12 hours. let me vent for a minute: the doctors at st. vincents are only slightly less bad than the nurses, who are the worst. we had a very bad experience at st. vincent's.
the whole experience brought up a couple of issues that crop up from time to time: the need for j to have specialized care and trusting one's instinct over what a doctor (or group of doctors or nurses) tells you. the er doctor at st. vincent's made a huge to-do about how unstable j was and how he shouldn't be moved without ANY knowledge of his medical history. i chalk this up to ego on the part of the doctor. there are a lot of doctors out there who are more interested in being right than on doing what is the best for the patient, which is why it scares the hell out of me when they put j, unscheduled, into the hospital.
anyhow, when i suggested rather than go through all the red tape to get him transferred, which took about four times as long as this doctor said it would, could we just get into a cab and head up to sloan, the doctor gave us a big scare story about j having another seizure in the cab and cardiac arrest, blah...blah...blah... which made us think, against our intution, that we should follow her advice. also, if we left, the doctor said it would be "against medical advice" which means that our insurance wouldn't cover the trip to the er. (they can always get you in the pocketbook.)
as it turns out, this doctor was not only wrong, but she lied to us about it as well and adding insult to injury, we just got a denial of coverage from our insurance for the ambulance ride the doctor was insistent upon j taking.
as it turns out, j's doctor at sloan, who i had the er doctor contact about making the transfer, told the er doctor to tell us to jump in a cab and get up to sloan ASAP. we only found that out on saturday when we saw her at sloan, j having been finally transported there at 9:30pm, 13 hours after arriving at st. vincent's.
cancer sucks, but sometimes the doctors and the nurses and all their bullshit suck more.
more on all of this later!!!
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