Our experience with my mom’s current hospitalization is doing little to bolster our confidence in the condition of healthcare in this country. We’re fully aware that there are staffing issues, that present staff feel overworked and underappreciated, perhaps residue from Covid-19. Blame it on Covid.
We have experienced this malaise and stress firsthand the last three or four days—miscommunication, lack of familiarity with Mom’s situation leading to incomplete and inaccurate info being shared with whoever is there with her, and a disappointingly prevalent atmosphere of short tempers and complaining. It’s enough to get one wondering just how competent some of the staff are—how thoroughly they’ve been trained or vetted, if vetting is something hospitals can even do (you’d think it would be).
Stepping back from the critique for a moment, Mom’s current roommate is like someone out of a textbook chapter describing coping skills and how to deal with difficult patients—loud, complaining, offering up her own opinions and diagnoses, though, in this case, also frightened by her own condition and prospects for getting better.
I realize the expectations placed on hospital staff—especially doctors and nurses- are high. They’re supposed to remain cool, calm, and collected even as some patients and their families act like complete assholes. And they’re supposed to know what they’re talking about! I can see how, after days on end of dealing with people for whom hospitals are by nature not a place they want to be, the staff feel the need to go on the defensive, to get chippy and give patients a taste of their own medicine. Or just stop caring. That’s one ugly spiral. Professionalism gets thrown out the window.
In my mother’s case, the stroke she’s had has rendered her incapable, as far as we can tell, of understanding much of anything. It has affected both her speech, and her ability to process information in her own head, to comprehend what others are trying to say or tell her. She appears to be employing some muscle memory in her responses, and she has basic motor function in her limbs. But within that, there is some loss of the same—she’s having to relearn how to drink from a straw and properly use a spoon and fork. And her stock response to practically every question is “good,” or “uhhuh.”
So… one might think that the hospital staff assigned to Mom might be aware of all this. And sometimes it seems that they’re not. Or, more discouragingly, that they just don’t have the time to give someone whose world has been turned upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye.
3 Cents' 