I have lived in a hospital as an on-call obstetrician on more days –and nights- than I can count over the years; hospitals were the grudging homes for me ever since medical school and the subsequent ages of specialty training that fell upon me like unbidden hats. And despite the palimpsest of colours I was forced to wear, hospitals have been the lodestars in my ever-changing world.
They weren’t all pleasant, although each beckoned with what seemed, from a distance at least, to be tempting endowments of knowledge and experience. Gifts are gifts, no matter the source, and I accepted each with gratitude, if not a little experientially-acquired caution. But although one must often stride boldly into the unknown to arrive at a destination, adaptation follows close behind. And then comes a fondness for what seemed, initially, to be strange. Chaotic. Frightening. And yet the utility of the situation breeds an eventual reconciliation. The disturbing, becomes assimilated into the quest for advantage. The hope for reward.
At least, that’s how an employee –a doctor or a nurse, especially- might rationalize the initial anxiety in a hospital: ‘short term pain for long term gain’, as the trite political aphorism would have it. But one can only wonder how the experience might strike a person who, travelling along the avenue of illness or accident, is forced to endure the unexpected and probably unwelcome distress.
There was an interesting article in an old BBC News article that questioned whether going into hospital might actually make you sick: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35131678
A Dr. Harlan Krumholz at the Yale School of Medicine became interested in in the statistic that ‘about a fifth of patients who leave US hospitals are back within a month.’ At first glance, this may seem obvious and uninteresting –the original cause for their admission may not have been completely dealt with, or perhaps there were complications from it that only surfaced after their discharge. Indeed, in many countries ‘re-admission rates are taken as a measure of the quality of care a hospital provides.’ But Krumholz realized that ‘only about a third of patient readmissions were related to the original cause of hospitalization. Patients’ reasons for returning to hospital were diverse and linked to their immune systems, balance, cognitive functioning, strength, metabolism and respiratory systems.’ He felt this was an entity unto itself and called it PHS (Post Hospital Syndrome): http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1212324
Basically, it assumes that hospitals unwittingly engender stress in patients by imposing disruptive and often intrusive regimes –some of which could safely be postponed or modified at night, for example. Patients already feel vulnerable and powerless in the face of illness or accident, and few would dare complain for fear of alienating those who are the providers of their badly-needed succour.
*
Vesna was not one of those. From the moment I saw her in the Emergency department with a severe and unresponsive pelvic infection, it was obvious she did not intend to relinquish control. Indeed, it was something of a diplomatic coup that one of the ER docs was able to convince her to allow an intravenous catheter to be inserted into her arm. She had to point out one of the only remaining veins –she knew her arm well- and direct his hands when he tried, unsuccessfully, to enter the tiny vessel that was hidden under a tattoo on the skin above her elbow.
It was around 2 A.M. when my resident called me about her, and just as I entered the little cubicle, someone dropped a large metal pan by the door. Before I could introduce myself she yelled at me. “I’m not gonna use one of those f– things, doc!” and she pointed to the bedpan on the floor.
The nurse looked up apologetically. “No, I’m just taking it out of the room, Vesna. It’s not for you.”
“Do I have to stay down here all night, doctor? It’s too f– noisy!” She said this all too loudly, ostensibly so her voice would be audible above the noise, but despite the outburst, despite the angry expression on her face, for a fleeting moment her eyes seemed to betray her when she glanced at me: they twinkled contritely, as if trying to excuse the behaviour of their owner.
My resident shook his head. There was apparently a bed available for her up on the ward so she’d be moved up shortly.
At hand-over rounds the next morning, the resident looked exhausted. Apparently Vesna had complained that the patient in the bed next to hers was snoring so she couldn’t sleep. And the nurses insisted on talking in the corridor whenever they walked by; the medicine carts they pushed were too noisy; or somebody kept coughing in the next room. So, Vesna demanded a sedative. That, of course, required the okay of a doctor first. And then, later, her IV stopped working –it had been inserted into a vein that would not ordinarily have been used- and the so the resident had been called to order the antibiotics to be given by some other route. The ones she needed were not available by mouth, so the only remaining way was by injection into her muscles. Vesna objected, of course, and so the resident had to go up to the ward again and explain things to her.
The hospital food was certainly not to Vesna’s liking –she said it made her sick- although, in fact, it was probably a side effect of her antibiotics. I’ve never liked institutional food either, but there seemed no end to her complaints while she was in hospital. We learned to tolerate her, of course, but I remember deciding to buy coffee for the resident staff when we discharged her.
I suppose I fell prey to the uncharitable assumption that Vesna was simply a grumpy person –someone whose circumstances had taught her to be suspicious of everything around her; someone who had learned to be tough and difficult to befriend. It was a wall she was forced to live behind -makeup she applied to protect the skin beneath.
She was supposed to come to my office for a follow-up visit a week or so after discharge but I have to admit that I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t show up for her appointment. My secretaries had actually double-booked me for her time, suspecting as much.
A few weeks later, I saw her name on my day sheet again but the woman who sat nervously in the waiting room pretending to be absorbed in a magazine was nothing like the Vesna I’d met in the hospital. This time she was dressed in slim black jeans with a frilly light blue cotton pullover. Her auburn hair was neatly combed and her ears adorned with enormous golden earrings that threatened to snag her curls every time she moved her head. When she saw me approaching, she smiled and stood up to extend her hand.
“I’m sorry I missed my last appointment, doctor,” she said, as soon as we were settled in my office, the embarrassment written in her eyes. “I had to be admitted to another hospital so I couldn’t make it…”
“The infection came back?” I said, concerned that we had discharged her too early.
She chuckled merrily at the thought and shook her head, making the earrings dodge in and out of her curls like it was a game of tag. Then the look of embarrassment returned. “Overdose.” She took a long breath and then shrugged. “Occupational hazard, I’m afraid.” She looked out of the window behind my seat for a moment. “Interesting, though…” she said slowly and deliberately, as if something had just occurred to her. “Same source, same amount… Never happened before and my boyfriend was okay so he couldn’t have cut it with bad shii…” She glanced at me and quickly corrected herself mid-word. “…ah, stuff… so I wonder how I could have overdosed.” She sat back in her chair and shrugged it off. “Maybe somebody’s trying to tell me to change my ways while I still can, eh?” She giggled like a school girl -and for a moment, she was.
Was she a victim of PHS or, in her case at least, the recipient of an opportunity? Were the two events even related, or in my rosy-eyed naiveté, am I projecting my own hopes on an otherwise indifferent world? I don’t know, of course, because I never saw Vesna again, but I’d like to think that something changed her. But for the better this time… Could PHS do that too?
I remembered the words of Emily Dickinson:
‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.’
