This is part of a letter I sent to the Minister of Health but it has some key issues your hospital might like to address.
Recently my daughter appeared on CTV news as a survivor of swine flu, the H1N1 virus. Thanks to the cutbacks and issue with doctors, she almost was not a "survivor." She was almost a fatality. If it wasn't for the fact that I have a very loud voice and a very big husband and son I'm sure we would have lost her.
Let me explain.
On May 26 my daughter woke up with headache, fever and a bad cough. She went to see her doctor who was unavailable so waited three hours at a walk in clinic to see a doctor. She saw the doctor on call, who told her she had a bit of a bug and she should rest, take some cough medicine and get some sleep.
Later that night around 7:30 she told me she felt like she couldn't breathe and her chest hurt. I took her to the emergency at the Ottawa General Hospital as the walk in was closed and I was worried about asthma. I brought her to the Emergency room around 8pm and asked a triage nurse to listen to her lungs.
Their reply was "Give us her health card and take a seat." They didn't even look at her. They didn't triage her and they certainly didn't look at her lungs.
My daughter and I waited patiently for someone to call her but after watching SIX patients come in after we got there and be triage'd, I lost my patience and demanded someone look at her.
"Someone already has." I was told.
"No they haven't." I replied,
Their answer........? "But we have her health card here on file. Ooops"
They then said they would get someone to look at her in a minute.
Another hour went by and my daughter began losing consciousness, vomiting and starting to faint. I am not kidding you....a nurse still didn't have time to look at her but the PATIENTS in the waiting room grabbed her blankets and kidney basins to throw up in. Many even offered to let her take their place. (Believe me this gives me a great love of my community and reaffirms my faith in human nature. People with broken arms are getting up and getting buckets? There is good in all.)
I almost took her home because she was so uncomfortable and in so much pain that she was having a hard time managing. I was going to call a personal friend to come listen to her lungs but then I decided that making a fuss might just be worth it so I went and raised my voice at the nurse who was very annoyed with me but decided to come take a look. She wasn't annoyed long, she was worried-- Caitlin's heart rate was extremely high Caitlin was in Xray .
They then put her in a side room and waited for a doctor. It was midnight before we saw someone who said, "Let's put in an IV see how it goes..."
Shortly after this, my daughter began panting and losing consciousness, until my husband and my son called the nurse who said she would "get there to take a look when she had time." I had had enough.
My husband and son waited another twenty minutes and began to roam the halls. They got a doctor. I still believe the doctor only came with them to avoid a scene. (They are quiet but BIG men.) The doctor took one look at her and she was in Critical care.
Six hours to have someone recognize that my daughter had double pneumonia that developed from mild to critical under three hours? Later we found out it was H1N1 and when we went to visit her on the respiratory floor we had to wait two hours before anyone could go in the room because they had such a shortage of face masks; they had to wait for some to be brought from the Civic Hospital across the city.
I went on in my letter to the Minister to beg for more tax breaks or benefits for doctors and funding for hospitals for basic supplies and personnel but the issues I would like you to address which I did not feel the Minister could address are;
When Caitlin finally was able to come out of Intensive Care, we thought , "She's joking, she's eating, she is on the Fifth floor, she is getting better, we can go home and take a nap. Two hours later, we were called from home by the nurse to come back to the hospital because, the nurse explained, my daughter was getting "unmanageable," and wanted us to come back {their words when they called, not mine.}
We came in to find there was again, not enough masks so no one could enter the room to find that my daughter was in extreme pain, they had put a diaper on her and she was coughing up blood, her buzzes to the nurses were not being answered. Her condition had deteriorated so badly we again felt we could not leave the hospital until she came home. So why was she calling the nurse and bothering them? Not rocket science. Yet I felt this was their attitude-- "Nothing we can do for her until we find more masks." You have to understand I was scared and furious. This set Caitlin's health back so much that she had to be transferred to the Respiratory Care floor.
This is my daughters experience in your hospital.
It gets better. While she was on the fifth floor, and we had been advised that Caitlin did actually have the H1N1 virus, we had contacted the friends she had gone on a trip with that Saturday, Sunday and advised if they had any symptoms they should get to medical care.
Her friend Cassie has developed symptoms. She comes to the Ottawa General Hospital Emergency and tells them she is Caitlin's friend and she is showing H1N1 symptoms. Where do they tell her to sit? In the Waiting Room! [This was before you implemented the mask/antibacterial policy I am thrilled to see you had brought in by the time we left hospital.]
It was not until my husband had the Public Health Nurse speak to one of your nursing staff on the phone that they thought it might be a good idea to isolate her.
Cassie is seen, kept overnight and it is decided that she can go home. Now her mother, who is a single mom on Welfare, who used her rent money to get her daughter to hospital asks if she can see a Social Worker to find out if Welfare will give her a taxi chit to get her still ill and likely contagious daughter home. What is she told by the nurse? "We don't have time, [the social services people] are really busy, you can take the bus."
Her mother came to us in the Critical Care waiting room in tears. The nurse finally calls the Social Services when I go downstairs and tag a nurse and beg her to call Welfare. They finally called and it was decided that just maybe it would be better to send them home in a taxi.
What I would like to ask you as the Hospital is why was Caitlin parked on the fifth floor with not enough medical equipment for someone to enter the room? Why would a nurse say my daughter was becoming, "unmanageable" when she was asking for help because she was coughing up blood? Why did I have to raise my voice to the nurse on the fifth floor to demand she get a doctor immediately so Catie could get pain management? Why do they respond to Diva voices and not to simple, polite requests as this is how I requested help first? How does an emergency room get so busy that they take her health card and don't look at the patient?
As you can see in my letter to the Minister I recognize that there are some serious shortages in funding but these mistakes are at the Care level.
The people in the Critical Care ward and on the seventh floor were amazing, supportive, dedicated at not only taking care of the health of the patient but the emotional level as well. Can they have a chat with the fifth floor? Because I have to tell you the staff of these units is above and beyond at their work and I have no doubt they give are the reason that Canada is considered the top medical system of North America. I firmly believe that they did Everything in their power to make Caitlin's stay and recovery as painless as possible. I honestly credit the nursing staff of these floors to her survival. Yes the doctors did their part but the nursing staff did the work.
Please understand, I am not trying to criticize your hospital. I am sincerely worried that this will happen with much far more serious consequences to other patients. I say prayers everyday for the care Caitlin received at the Critical Care and 7th floor. Twenty years ago I lost a child to SIDS so I know what it's like to lose a child and I would never want another parent to experience this.
I will be eternally grateful for the dedication of your staff but these mistakes could have led to us losing our daughter and I am deeply disturbed that they happened.
Note: The hospital implemented an entire new system of Emergency Care and now screen coughs and flu like systems, as well as isolating potential cases.
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