The Hospital

(Originally Posted By Leslie Coggin in Living with RSD/CRPS at 8/19/2011 11:13:00 PM)

 I was admitted to the hospital yesterday (8/19/2011) for cellulitis of both lower legs and feet.  The skin was so tight, shiny and red and the legs were swollen to at least twice their normal size... maybe three times; they were huge!  My legs kept falling asleep every so often and then I would fall.  I think that after the fourth fall, when my forehead was so numb that I couldn’t feel a brush go through it.  I had gone to see my Internist every week for the last month and he had given me several different antibiotics to try to combat the virus but it just wasn’t working.  The internist then decided to admit me for a course of IV antibiotics; positive that would do the trick.

From the moment a doctor decides to admit you; you lose complete control.  You are in the hands of the hospital "machine".  First, you have to contact the family to let them know what is going on; then comes the phone calls to the pastor and neighbor so that Oz, the great and wonderful rat terrier, is taken care of.  Then it is hurry up and wait, and wait and wait and wait some more.  You have to wait for a room to be clean and ready.  you wait for the doctor to call in orders and then you wait for transport to the room.

The trend that I dislike the most is the hospitalist.  The hospitalist is a doctor that specializes in the management of a hospital stay.  The doctor does not know you or anything that is going on with you except the one diagnosis that sent you there in the first place.  When you have CRPS though, I think its a little short sighted and maybe a little dangerous because so many systems can be involved.  The hospitalist I had had heard about CRPS and thought that it had something to do with the nervous system and was "sort of neuropathic in nature" but was not sure that it really had anything to do with anything.  I really miss the time when your Internist knew your health issues inside and out and followed you from cradle to the grave including all the little hospital stays along the way.  I think that the patient loses out when a hospitalist is brought in.

The hospital stay was punctuated by visits from a nutritionist. the dietician, the dietician tech, blood work, a trip to Doppler, visits from an IV team, admitting team, breathing team, cardiac team, med team... teams for this and teams for that.  In fact, up until the doctor decided to discharge me I was seeing some type of team.   The last thing that I did was to see the discharge team.

I suppose that the whole purpose of this blog is that once the doc says that those magic words that admit you to a bed in the hospital; you hurry up and wait to see some type of team.  You sit and wait for the next team to show up.  You wait for diagnosis, you wait for treatment,  you wait for meds and he bathroom and to eat… you wait.

Thank God I am discharged and home!