One thing that’s not supposed to happen at the hospital is
that the patient gets lost. Here I don't mean
"lost" in what may count grammatically as a passive sense of that word: I always
knew where I was during our latest stay. Instead I'm thinking of
"lost" as an active verb: they forgot me and where I was!
To be sure, it's really not so simple to prevent this. MSK is a big institution with a lot of people
flowing through its hallways. No doubt because of this reality, they recently started
an electronic tracking system, a wristband with some sort of electronic link,
which I’ve used on each of my last two visits there, including the most recent
on January 15, 2019.
We arrived around 3 AM that morning and I was connected at
once to the tracking system. (My last post gave our arrival time as 2 AM, but that was wrong; Teresa tells me that 2 AM was when we left our house to go to MSK. If you caught this discrepancy, my hat is off to you!) But some hours later – I really don’t know the
timing clearly, in part because I was being medicated – Teresa stopped by the
Urgent Care front desk and asked when someone would be coming to check on me
again. The person at the desk answered that they thought I’d already gone home.
This was not a good answer for us to hear. We’re not Urgent
Care novices, so we’re familiar with the idea that its services can be slow. There is a lot going on. But it’s not good to just get lost. Aside from the fact that I was tired and
ill, I was also definitely not at home, 15 miles away. Just as important, if I had
left the hospital on my own, what was anyone doing about it? Shouldn’t someone
have come to look for me? Wasn’t it a matter of concern that I had just up and
left? Wasn’t that the very concern that the electronic tracking system was
meant to counteract?
We didn’t leave the matter there. Teresa talked with other
staff, one of whom, while also offering other reasons for what had happened,
confirmed that the hospital had lost track of me. Another staff person told us
that she was not questioning Teresa’s veracity, but of course this is the kind
of language people use precisely when they are questioning someone
else’s veracity. And we were at that moment in the very situation she was
contending could not happen!
The hospital as a whole took the matter seriously and
respectfully, however: we received a visit from an empathetic patient advocate,
and the next day I spoke by phone with someone who I think was in charge of the
nursing staff overall. A doctor we spoke with seemed dismayed too, but
emphasized that issues like this are the domain of the nursing staff and not the
medical staff – an interesting glimpse of how MSK is organized internally.
None of this makes MSK anything but an institution trying to
serve its patients well. It doesn’t even directly alter how we as patients and caregivers should behave; it always seems wise to be vigilant, politely vigilant, when
dealing with an institution like MSK, and that includes when trying to make sure
the treatment I need comes when it should. But still it didn’t leave a good
taste in our mouths.
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