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Not the best of health |
So you haven’t been in the best of health, and you’re going in for a procedure. You’ve done Internet searches, asked friends and family, and hey, the local hospital gets pretty good Yahoo Local reviews, right? So in you go, thinking your care will be meticulously managed by healthcare professionals.
Think again. You know how you once got that waitress who ignored your table, brought you cold food, or otherwise just didn’t give a shit about you, and seemed to hate her life? Well now extrapolate that to any other profession in the world, including doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, X-ray techs… everyone in the hospital.
A job is a job. Some people are just damn lazy, some are incredibly terrible at what they do. It’s just that some jobs we expect more out of the workers. Here are a few examples of some real screw ups.
ICU Nurses fired for taping
patient's mouth shut
Penny Artalejo was admitted to Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo on Saturday Dec. 17 with nausea and anxiety from taking medication for chronic neck pain.
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| Artalejo |
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| Nurse wants you to be quiet |
Artalejo said the nurses knew what they were doing was wrong. Though in pain, she said she was alert the whole time. Her daughters were furious when their mother told them about the incident the next day.
Janet Frank, a spokeswoman for the hospital, said there was a full investigation and the nurses - one male and one female - were fired Wednesday.
The incident has been reported to Utah's Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing.
Nurse's suicide highlights twin tragedies of medical errors
| Kimberly Hiatt killed herself after overdosing a baby, revealing the anguish of caregivers who make mistakes.  |
| Happier times: not dead yet |
For registered nurse Kimberly Hiatt, the horror began last Sept. 14, the moment she realized she'd overdosed a fragile baby with 10 times too much medication.
Stunned, she told nearby staff at the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Seattle Children's Hospital what had happened. "It was in the line of, 'Oh my God, I have given too much calcium,'" recalled a fellow nurse, Michelle Asplin, in a statement to state investigators.
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Here’s your baby back |
In Hiatt's 24-year career, all of it at Seattle Children's, dispensing 1.4 grams of calcium chloride - instead of the correct dose of 140 milligrams - was the only serious medical mistake she'd ever made, public investigation records show.
What happened next:
Received the wrong heart and lungs, then died
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Good job, guys 17-year-old Jésica Santillán died 2 weeks after receiving the heart and lungs of a patient whose blood type did not match hers. Doctors at the Duke University Medical Center failed to check the compatibility before surgery began. . After a rare second transplant operation to attempt to rectify the error, she suffered brain damage and complications that subsequently hastened her death. |
An open heart invasive procedure...
on the wrong patient
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| Why does this guy have a vagina again? |
The patient had been on the operating table for an hour. Doctors had made an incision in her groin, punctured an artery, threaded in a tube and snaked it up into her heart. That was when the phone rang and a doctor from another department asked "what are you doing with my patient?" There was nothing wrong with her heart. The cardiologist working on the woman checked her chart, and saw that he was making an awful mistake.
Wide-Awake Surgery led to his suicide
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| You signed a consent, right? Right? |
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| One of us can’t feel anything |
According to the complaint, anesthesiologists administered the drugs to numb the patient, but they failed to give him the general anesthetic that would render him unconscious until 16 minutes after surgeons first cut into his abdomen.
The Surgeon who removed
the wrong leg
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| Still needing one more surgery |
It was later revealed that a chain of errors before the surgery culminated in the wrong leg being prepped for the procedure. While the surgeon's team realized in the middle of the procedure that they were operating on the wrong leg, it was already too late, and the leg was removed. As a result of the error, the surgeon's medical license was suspended for six months and he was fined $10,000. University Community Hospital in Tampa, the medical center where the surgery took place, paid $900,000 to King and the surgeon involved in the case paid an additional $250,000.
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| I really wanted to be Art major |
So it’s a no-brainer that these people are as good as the average American worker. Meaning that some are good and some really suck at their jobs. Given that these people work on the human body though, the tendency for each department- especially physicians- is to think they’re some sort of Demigod. Egos are massive and infighting is prevalent. All think they’re the only ones who are right; however, MDs are at the top of this parasitic food chain. It’s probably a natural occurrence then, that these fleas are actually gods in one area…
Q. What is the profession with the highest rate of suicide?
A. Physicians.
Report from Psychology Today here. Whether the doctor is male or female doesn't seem to matter, they go at the same rate.
According to the Straight Dope though, food batchmakers are the highest profession with suicides. What, you may ask, is a food batchmaker? According to the US Department of Labor, they:
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| Batchmakers contemplating stuff |
"Set up and operate equipment that mixes or blends ingredients used in the manufacturing of food products. Includes candy makers and cheese makers."
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| suicide kit |
So enjoy your stay at the hospital under the 24 hour care of our healthcare professionals. Just don’t fall asleep.
