Where do I begin, first let me say I am now terrified of the E.R. In may of this year I had three days with a fever over 103°, and difficulty breathing, it finally got so bad, my husband called 911, I arrived via ambulance to our only hospital in our town, and they immeadiately placed a mask on me that sucked over my nose and mouth so tightly that it made me feel like I was smothering, I was so scared that I kept taking the mask off, instead of the doctor using a different mask , one they later used for the breathing treatments, This doctor had them strap me down and said to his nurse” I am tired of messing with her, take her down NOW !!!, he never asked me if there was any one I needed to call, I heard him say they were going to intubate, I begged them not to, He pretended not to hear me, the nuse lowered my head and I was in a medically induced coma for the next twelve days. When they woke me the only thing I could move were my eyes, I was scared mostly because I had never physically seen anyone in a coma before, and no one told me what to expect, and I was in horrible pain, I also had developed these open sores in my nose and on my mouth from the friction of the movement of the breathing tubes. I now have these ugly scars on my face. It seems I also had feces all down between my legs that the ekg technician alerted the nurses about, they were arguing about who was gonna clean me up, they kept saying that it wasn’t their job to “wipe my ass”, I was mortified. It kept happening over and over again, when my fingers finally worked well enough to push the call button for the nurses station, I was told they would be there when they could, Once it was nearly two hours that I layed there like that, by now my bottom was blistered, what was coming out of me was hot. This time that same E.R.doctor came by to look at my ankles to check for swelling, he lifted the covers up and when he saw the waste between my legs he made a puking sound, threw his arms up in the air and left without telling the nurses to clean me, and just walked out of the room, it was days before I saw him again, when they extubated me it seems I flatlined for over five minutes apparently I had a heart attack, now I was no longer their problem to the mmicu, now I was the cardiac .intensive care units problem. It turns out that there was a whole different kind of care I recieved there, these folks were very sweet to me. I Did not know how sick I really was until I got my medical records upon my discharge. I was severely septic, I had two separate myocardial infarcts, and I had acute respiratory distress syndrome.I was potassium deficient, and my blood pressure was so low, they watched me like a hawk with someone constantly monitoring my blood pressure and heart rate. it has been four months since Ive been home and I keep having nightmares about this as well as not being able to get out of bed except for drs.appointments. I am now so afraid of dying that I think about nothing else. My husband says I should see a psychiatrist. I think he may be right.
