The Other Side Of The Story
Posted by on Monday, July 31, 2017
In the local newspaper today there was an article by a prominent local lawyer detailing his experiences in sitting with a client and friend of his who was in hospital dying. In this article he described the kindness and compassion of the emergency room staff who he dealt with, and how caring they were for both the dying patient and for him as a witness to the final moments of his friend's life. He paints a very rosy picture of hospital staff.
I don't know anything about this particular case, and I don't really know any of the participants aside from knowing this lawyer by his reputation as an advocate for the elderly and the infirm. I am sure that his comments are an accurate portrayal of how he and his client were treated. However it did make me think of another incident at the same emergency room in the same hospital, which took place eleven years ago and which I do know a little more about.
I must be clear here that this incident took place more than a decade ago, and almost certainly there were different staff members and perhaps different policies. However in my opinion it was so appalling that it deserves to be spoken of, even this long after the events occurred. The patients and their family members who suffered under the old system deserve to have their side of the story presented as well.
The incident that I refer to happened in April 2006, and began with my father collapsing on his kitchen floor. He had suffered a stroke nearly eight years earlier, and at this point I had been a fulltime unpaid caregiver for him for seven of those years. (As an aside, I was supposed to be working and studying in Edmonton in 1999, but a social worker and a physiotherapist had each promised that if I would look after my father at home for "just a couple of weeks" they would have a carehome for him before I had to go back to school in the late summer. Seven years later he was still languishing on the waitlist, but that is another story)
When my father collapsed on the floor and became unresponsive, we immediately phoned the emergency number for an ambulance. The paramedics who arrived were the rudest I have ever met. Before even treating my father, one began criticizing my mother for not keeping the house clean enough - in spite of the fact that she spent hours each week just cleaning, and was also having to spend a lot of time looking after my invalid father. A second paramedic complained that it wasn't their job to deal with people fainting. Another one only wanted to talk to her coworkers about her great vacation. Finally when they realized that my father was unconscious on the floor and sweating profusely, they reluctantly agreed to take him to the hospital.
At half past midnight a nurse from the Victoria General Hospital phoned my mother to tell her that they didn't know why my father had collapsed but they were sending my father home. The only problem was, the medical transport vehicles do not work at that late hour, and my father's pre-existing medical problems meant they couldn't use the bus or a taxi. The nurse insisted that my mother would have to drive to the hospital in the middle of the night to pick him up. My mother politely told the nurse that she doesn't drive and doesn't have a car, and my truck had broken down and so I couldn't pick him up either. The nurse was not happy and hung up.
Half an hour later at one a.m the emergency room doctor for the night phoned my mother. He was not happy that we had disobeyed his orders to pick up my father from the hospital immediately and started giving her a dressing down in the middle of the night. He was incredibly rude to her and demanding, but even a self-important egocentric doctor could not change the simple fact that my mother did not have a car.
We later learned that the emergency room staff were apologizing to my father for their inability to force my mother and I to pick him up in the middle of the night. He had worked in the hospital for thirty years and most of the staff were close friends of his. However my father decided to respond by telling the emergency room staff that he had bought a hand gun and planned to shoot my mother and I. The staff decided that since my father was a friend of their's, this did not need to be reported. When I questioned this later various staff members explained that they didn't want to upset him, and so they had decided to just let him go home and "hope for the best".
And again, I don't want this to seem like all hospital staff are evil. A few hours later their was a shift change, and the daytime doctor for the emergency room was appalled by what the nighttime staff had done. He even went so far as to order my father into psychiatric care, and he was held for another week while the physician, psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse, and social worker worked together to find a solution to the problems that my father was causing (although they never did.) These later medical staff expressed outrage both at the treatment we had received in 1999 when the hospital lied to us and dumped my father's care on me knowing the damage it would cause, and at the treatment by the emergency room staff who thought it was appropriate to verbally abuse the patient's wife and son in the middle of the night.
I do not know why those paramedics and emergency room staff were so rude and abusive. Maybe they couldn't understand how a guy they had worked with for years and who did them favours could also be physically abusing his wife and children. Maybe he was blackmailing them, as he had done previously with other people in his life. Maybe he had altered his own medical records as he had claimed to have done to many others who had crossed him over the years. I just don't know, and will probably never know why, as one nurse put it, "they displayed extremely unprofessional and inappropriate behaviour".
I am sure that most of the staff at the VGH are caring and compassionate, and I am glad that someone is writing in the newspaper to commend the good ones. However I believe it is also important to see the dark side of the hospital, and to know that on that night eleven years ago we experienced no humanity at all.
I don't know anything about this particular case, and I don't really know any of the participants aside from knowing this lawyer by his reputation as an advocate for the elderly and the infirm. I am sure that his comments are an accurate portrayal of how he and his client were treated. However it did make me think of another incident at the same emergency room in the same hospital, which took place eleven years ago and which I do know a little more about.
I must be clear here that this incident took place more than a decade ago, and almost certainly there were different staff members and perhaps different policies. However in my opinion it was so appalling that it deserves to be spoken of, even this long after the events occurred. The patients and their family members who suffered under the old system deserve to have their side of the story presented as well.
The incident that I refer to happened in April 2006, and began with my father collapsing on his kitchen floor. He had suffered a stroke nearly eight years earlier, and at this point I had been a fulltime unpaid caregiver for him for seven of those years. (As an aside, I was supposed to be working and studying in Edmonton in 1999, but a social worker and a physiotherapist had each promised that if I would look after my father at home for "just a couple of weeks" they would have a carehome for him before I had to go back to school in the late summer. Seven years later he was still languishing on the waitlist, but that is another story)
When my father collapsed on the floor and became unresponsive, we immediately phoned the emergency number for an ambulance. The paramedics who arrived were the rudest I have ever met. Before even treating my father, one began criticizing my mother for not keeping the house clean enough - in spite of the fact that she spent hours each week just cleaning, and was also having to spend a lot of time looking after my invalid father. A second paramedic complained that it wasn't their job to deal with people fainting. Another one only wanted to talk to her coworkers about her great vacation. Finally when they realized that my father was unconscious on the floor and sweating profusely, they reluctantly agreed to take him to the hospital.
At half past midnight a nurse from the Victoria General Hospital phoned my mother to tell her that they didn't know why my father had collapsed but they were sending my father home. The only problem was, the medical transport vehicles do not work at that late hour, and my father's pre-existing medical problems meant they couldn't use the bus or a taxi. The nurse insisted that my mother would have to drive to the hospital in the middle of the night to pick him up. My mother politely told the nurse that she doesn't drive and doesn't have a car, and my truck had broken down and so I couldn't pick him up either. The nurse was not happy and hung up.
Half an hour later at one a.m the emergency room doctor for the night phoned my mother. He was not happy that we had disobeyed his orders to pick up my father from the hospital immediately and started giving her a dressing down in the middle of the night. He was incredibly rude to her and demanding, but even a self-important egocentric doctor could not change the simple fact that my mother did not have a car.
We later learned that the emergency room staff were apologizing to my father for their inability to force my mother and I to pick him up in the middle of the night. He had worked in the hospital for thirty years and most of the staff were close friends of his. However my father decided to respond by telling the emergency room staff that he had bought a hand gun and planned to shoot my mother and I. The staff decided that since my father was a friend of their's, this did not need to be reported. When I questioned this later various staff members explained that they didn't want to upset him, and so they had decided to just let him go home and "hope for the best".
And again, I don't want this to seem like all hospital staff are evil. A few hours later their was a shift change, and the daytime doctor for the emergency room was appalled by what the nighttime staff had done. He even went so far as to order my father into psychiatric care, and he was held for another week while the physician, psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse, and social worker worked together to find a solution to the problems that my father was causing (although they never did.) These later medical staff expressed outrage both at the treatment we had received in 1999 when the hospital lied to us and dumped my father's care on me knowing the damage it would cause, and at the treatment by the emergency room staff who thought it was appropriate to verbally abuse the patient's wife and son in the middle of the night.
I do not know why those paramedics and emergency room staff were so rude and abusive. Maybe they couldn't understand how a guy they had worked with for years and who did them favours could also be physically abusing his wife and children. Maybe he was blackmailing them, as he had done previously with other people in his life. Maybe he had altered his own medical records as he had claimed to have done to many others who had crossed him over the years. I just don't know, and will probably never know why, as one nurse put it, "they displayed extremely unprofessional and inappropriate behaviour".
I am sure that most of the staff at the VGH are caring and compassionate, and I am glad that someone is writing in the newspaper to commend the good ones. However I believe it is also important to see the dark side of the hospital, and to know that on that night eleven years ago we experienced no humanity at all.
I am a theoretical physicist and mathematician, as well as an unpaid caregiver. In the past I have also been a computer programmer, roboticist, author, web designer, and countless other titles too numerous to list.