Stamford Hospital- Mini Review

As most of you know, I've been in the hospital most of last week with an epidural that had a general result that fell short of my expectations. It helped some but I'm still on crutches and I might be a little bitter because on Monday (okay, I am), just as they got the epidural to the level where I was getting some relief (5 ml per liter), Jay, the night nurse, who came on shift at 7pm:

• cut the epidural from 5 to a 2
• then cut my percocet from 10 mg to 5 mg
• then he refused to give me any of my other regular medication like klonopin which I had not had since much earlier in the morning
  
• wouldn't give me the neurontin (for nerve pain)
  
• and said there was no reason for me to be on trazadone ( a sleep medication without the potential effects of Ambien) therefore he wouldn't give it.

I asked him to call the doctor and he refused saying "I don't want to call him and make him mad. Call him yourself, because I don't want him be mad at me, but if you don't mind him getting mad and you and want to take the chance, go ahead." As we all know, it is inappropriate to give a patient the home number of a doctor. Then he came back and told me as a "special favor to me" he called the doctor and told him all the rates of the medication and the doctor told Jay, the nurse, it was fine. This is appaling for a surgical floor of the hospital when patients are predictably a great amount of pain.

Two things, the doctor is a female and when she saw me the next morning during rounds she was upset by what this nurse had done and said that he had given her different information. She put in an order to immediately move the epidural rate up to 8 to be graduated up to 12 by the end of the day. This didn't work as far as decreasing my pain and I just wanted to cry in frustration. When you are in pain 24/7 with no period of relief, I cannot explain how horrible it is and how I can see the logic in suicide. NOT that I am suicidal, but how that can seem like a feasible option to some.

Because of the surge in pain between 7pm Monday night continuing through to the next morning at 8am, it was never brought back down to a workable level and she would have to replace the epidural because it had become displaced. The epidural was turned off at this point. VERY upsetting.

I meet with her Monday and we are trying to get another approval from the insurance company to have a second chance which we all know how easy that can be especially when it's a subrogated claim.

So that's all about me, tell me something fun or exciting that happened for you recently?