THE EVIL NURSE

Ask any health professional if he or she ever wants to be hospitalized. To a person, the answer is no because they know what dangers lurk in those halls of healing.  Everything from staph infections, errors in medication, medication given to the wrong patients, operating on the wrong body part (remember the doctor who operated on the wrong side of a woman’s brain at a noted New York hospital?) or on the wrong patient. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to be hospitalized but we do it at our own risk regardless of the hospitals’ or the staffs’ credentials. 

Now I don’t want to upset you but the following experience is true and was avoidable. In 2001, I needed a left hip replacement; the right one had been done two years before and the result was perfect. So when I returned to the same hospital and the same orthopedist, I expected it to be a piece of cake. Not.

I had been advised by a friend who had had the procedure when I had the right one done that I should have private duty nurses round the clock because the nursing staff was so overworked you could wait hours for help and I wouldn’t be able to move out of bed without help. It was good advice for the first operation. However, for the second, it was a disaster.

When I checked into the hospital I booked round the clock nurses. The operation went fine – the physician is a first class orthopedic surgeon – and I was recuperating as expected.  Since I was a hip replacement veteran, I knew all about how to get my body out of the bed.  It‘s simple.  You slide the good leg slowly off the side of the bed and the nurse, holding the foot of the “new” leg, gently slides it off the bed.  Well, one of those nurses was either incompetent or sadistic. 

It was four days after the surgery at about eleven PM and I wanted to go to the bathroom. She started assisting me when she twisted my leg with such force, she yanked the prosthesis right out of the socket ripping the quadriceps and flexor muscles. I think my scream was heard round the world. I had never felt such pain.  The floor nurse came rushing into my room as I lay there screaming and she called the resident on duty.  The established protocol is that whenever there is the least suspicion of dislocation, the hip must be X-rayed.  But this resident chose not to follow the protocol and instead shot me full of morphine but did not even enter it in the drug log.  A major error.  In fact, one might call it malpractice.  I apparently awoke sometime during the night in severe pain and the nurse gave me another shot of morphine. That one was logged.

I awoke about seven in the morning very drugged and somehow remembered my daughter’s phone number which frankly surprised me since once I program a number into my phone, I delete it from my head. However, the mind is a wondrous thing and the number was retrieved. When she answered, I managed to tell her that something terrible had happened.

She called my son, they called my surgeon and all raced down to the hospital.  I was less than coherent and totally immobilized.  When my doctor arrived, he had an X-ray machine brought to my room and indeed the prosthesis was dislocated.  An anesthesiologist was summoned (he used an amazing drug, Versed, so I felt nothing but was able to carry on a conversation) and the doc tried to manually relocate the prosthesis.  I lay in the bed immobilized for the next twenty-four hours. 

The following morning he returned, asked me to move my toes, couldn’t do it, the X-ray machine was again summoned and again it showed the dislocation.  The doc tried to relocate it once more, another twenty-four hours of being drugged and immobilized and the next morning the toes still would not move.

“We’ll have to operate again,” he told me. When he did, he discovered that when the evil nurse yanked out the prosthesis, she ripped both the quadriceps and flexor muscles that couldn’t show on the X-Rays.  That was why the manual relocation wouldn’t work.  He relocated the prosthesis, sewed the muscles together and I spent another week courtesy of my medical insurance.

Was I angry about this?  You bet.  I found a medical malpractice attorney and sued both the nurse and the hospital, both of which will remain nameless since that was a condition of the settlement. I attended the depositions of both the evil nurse and the incompetent resident and controlled myself as I listened to them lie throughout the interrogation by my attorney. The nurse said that I never screamed but winced.  The resident denied giving me morphine and since there was no paper trail to prove that he did, my word was not good enough.  Obviously I survived but spent over two years taking physical therapy.

My favorite fantasy is running into that nurse, knocking her down and yanking her leg out of its socket. Do you think I’m vindictive?  You bet.