‼️TW: Medical Trauma, Hospitals

This month is special to me for many reasons, but one of the biggest is being able to celebrate surviving and living for several more years, despite being subjected to one of the most medically negligent scenarios one could ever imagine. February has become a mile marker of, “I did it— I made it out alive, again.”

On February 10th, 2020, I had to call 911 for myself for the very first time in my life. As someone who was a frequent flyer in the emergency department and hospital in my teens, I was particularly aversive to the idea of going back for any reason. I’d have to be dying to entertain that for the briefest of moments. Unfortunately for me, I was dying. Off and on the previous night and more consistently into the morning, I had been throwing up blood of the coffee-grounds variety and knew something was gravely wrong. My stats were really concerning, I was pale as a ghost, and losing consciousness intermittently. So, I did what any person in my position would do and called for help. 

The fire department’s ambulance and a fire truck both showed up. The department’s staff came into my mother’s home where I was living and did a quick look over me, but didn’t take vitals. Even though it was readily apparent that I was not doing well and they were aware I was throwing up blood, they made me walk out of the house and down the 3 steps to the gurney near the parked ambulance under my own weight, offering an elbow for “support.” They finally took vitals on the short 3 minute drive to the nearest hospital, but didn’t start an IV or give fluids. 

Once we arrived, they dropped the gurney and I off at the Emergency Department entrance for EMS and briefly talked to hospital staff before taking off. Somehow, they either didn’t convey the situation appropriately or the ED staff misconstrued the situation; but inevitably, I was not triaged correctly. Instead of being taken back to a room immediately, I was told by hospital staff to get off the gurney and walk to the ED waiting room. I couldn’t walk because I was so weak, and with obvious annoyance, they put me in a transport wheelchair and set me out in the waiting room. 

It was there that I would sit and continue to destabilize for over an hour, throwing up blood repeatedly into disposable sickness bags. My life force eventually waned to the point where I lost consciousness again, and my mom had to frantically call over staff to do something. 

By the time I got back to a room in the ED, I had regained cognizance just enough to hear the nurses say that I needed a rapid blood transfusion and was on the cusp of death. Multiple medical personnel were coming in and out of the room— it was absolute chaos. The barcodes on the transfusion bags wouldn’t scan, and ED staff were more focused on troubleshooting tech issues than saving the life that was wasting away right in front of them. My mom had to yell and beg them to give me the blood, which they finally did after several minutes of frantic scrambling. Her panicked face, the pain of the biggest needle I’ve ever seen penetrating my arm, and a code being called were the last things I remembered before I slipped back into darkness. 

All in all, I had to have 3 units of blood rapidly transfused. 

I woke up a couple hours later in the Intensive Care Unit. The nurses there told me that I was, “lucky to be alive,” and they, “usually don’t see patients with such severe blood loss from internal bleeding make it through to this floor, especially after flatlining.” My mom was nearby and I could tell that this was another seriously close call in terms of permanence, because I saw that same overwrought look on her face the last time I had medically died in this hospital almost exactly 8 months prior. 

The next couple of days were hell, but the nurses in the ICU were very kind and let my mom stay overnight. Had it been just one month later, Covid protocols would’ve prevented such and I likely wouldn’t have made it out of that hospital alive. To this day, I still feel immensely lucky about the timing of this unfortunate event. 

It was ultimately determined that I had a severe stomach ulcer as a result of having to take high daily doses of Indomethacin (Indocin) for the past 2 years to help keep the disabling symptoms of Hemicrania Continua at bay. It’s a disappointing complication that happens when you have to take high dose NSAIDs, and I sadly joined the group of Hemicrania Continua patients that were forced to return to suffering with the lack of an alternative remedy. 

Regardless of the fact that Indomethacin was the reason for the ulcer and subsequent internal bleeding, had first responders and the emergency department staff actually done their jobs properly, I wouldn’t have needed a rapid blood transfusion. I wouldn’t have flatlined in that godforsaken hospital again. I wouldn’t have needed to spend any time in intensive care at all. These facts absolutely infuriated me, and I was more than ready to get the hell out of that place and back into a more comfortable setting. 

After about 58 hours in the ICU, I was finally stable enough to be moved to a different part of the hospital. Apparently, that place was the “Kidney Unit.” My new room was shared with an older white lady who was anything but a lady. She was loudly swearing up a storm, carelessly tossing homophobic slurs about, and intentionally set the machines into a constant frenzy of horrid beeping. This was no place to continue recovering. I needed to get out of there, stat. 

The nurses weren’t sure when a doctor could come see me for discharge, and my neighbor’s hostility was rapidly escalating. I asked to see a charge nurse about the possibility of being moved, and after quite some time, she finally arrived. Not only was there nowhere else to go, the doctor on staff had left for the evening and I was informed I’d have to wait until morning to be discharged. 

Unsatisfied with this, I asked to be discharged anyways. It wasn’t necessarily, “against medical advice,” there simply wasn’t anyone there to provide said advice, and I wasn’t about to subject myself to any more torture than I had already endured in that place. This is where things got even more frustrating, especially speaking as an advocate who knows my patient rights inside and out. 

For whatever ridiculous reason, the charge nurse thought it would be a good idea to threaten me by stating that if I self-discharged, my insurance company wouldn’t pay for my hospital bills. This is a flat-out lie. As if I wasn’t already woefully perturbed from all the ruckus, her deceptive bullshit really ticked me off. I confidently and firmly told her that she’s a liar and asked what I needed to do in order to leave. She snidely handed me paperwork to sign, which I did immediately. I don’t think I’ve ever moved a pen to paper so fast in my entire life. 

I quickly changed back into my clothes, waited for wheelchair transport, and made my way back to the car with my mother. Chris had called out of work and already made the 5 hour drive across the state to wait for me at my mom’s house. Once there, we realized that the medications the hospital was supposed to give me were nowhere to be found, because they sent wheelchair transport up before they ever got an order in with the pharmacy. Transport wasn’t willing to wait, and I wasn’t willing to keep fighting with hospital employees. Because I was already home, I really thought I could wing it and do without. I thought wrong. 

After a few hours of writhing around in pain on the sofa, Chris took me back to the emergency department in the wee hours of the morning. They put us into the coldest, most uncomfortable room for 4 hours while they tracked down a doctor to write a script for the same meds I was supposed to get before leaving. The doctor was super snarky, acting like I was the one who didn’t do things correctly earlier. For all intents and purposes, I didn’t need hospital care or supervision— I just needed the meds they were supposed to give me in the first place. Had they simply given me even just a dose of said meds before I left just hours earlier, instead of punishing me for making an informed decision, I wouldn’t have had to return and could’ve easily gotten them through my primary care provider the next day. 

Every event that transpired in that hospital completely shattered my faith in the medical system. I couldn’t trust first responders or emergency department staff. It made me question what the purpose of arriving by ambulance was if they were just going to chuck you into a waiting room to die, and I wondered what would happen in the event of a heart attack or stroke— would you simply be left for dead and discarded? Coincidentally, there are no records of my arrival, stay, or discharge; almost like they knew they fucked up and wanted to hide it by not allowing records to exist in the first place. 

Since then, I have somehow managed to stay out of the hospital for anything other than routine care reasons. At this point, I’m still on the fence about whether or not I would go back, even if I was actively experiencing a medical emergency or dying. That said, I’m in a different city, and a different state altogether now. I can only hope that things are different here, because I don’t really want to find out firsthand. 

All I know, is that I’m glad to be alive. And every year February rolls around, I get to celebrate another year that I’m marked safe from the dangers of Providence Sacred Heart Hospital. I may have been born there, but I certainly won’t die there again, and never permanently.