The bleeding was mysterious: Re-admission to the hospital

Here's the story of Jocelyn Angel Mommy of Melbourne, Florida, found on Nikki's Project Angel Mommy on MySpace:

I married a man who already had two children (then ages 11 and 9) from his first marriage. It was my only marriage and I had no children and I really wanted to have my own but I had to wait till he was ready which took more than 6 years. We did conceive quickly though and I found out I was pregnant on my 36th birthday in April 2004. My pregnancy was rough on me -- I was extremely nauseated and vomiting a lot for the first couple of months. But I was starting to feel better and get excited around halfway through and I allowed myself to believe I would really be bringing a baby home.

On Aug. 10, 2004, at 22 weeks, I started bleeding at home. I was admitted to Labor & Delivery and the bleeding was mysterious but they found my blood pressure to be extremely high. Although I was released the next day with meds (bleeding had stopped), the BP didn't come down so I was readmitted a few days later. I was in the hospital for another 10 days but nothing they did kept my BP down so I was transferred to a larger hospital in Orlando on Aug. 24th. There I got very sick very quickly and was diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome...my life was in immediate danger and my only chance was to deliver the baby immediately.

[HELLP syndrome, a variant of pre-eclampsia, stands for: Hemolytic anemia, Elevated Liver enzymes and Low Platelet count, according to Wikipedia.]


Jocelyn was one of the people whose "bounce-back" re-admission to the hospital can indicate that the quality of care during her first hospital admission had been sub-par. This is a disturbingly common occurrence. In a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine of April 2, Dr. Stephen Jencks and his collaborators found that one-fifth (20%) of Medicare inpatients were re-admitted within a month of their discharge. The results: great suffering, like Jocelyn's, and great costs, many of them unnecessary.

Apparently, many of the re-admitted people in the study had not seen their primary care doctor between the two inpatient stays. Dr. Jencks found that half of the patients with medical (i.e., non-surgical) discharges had not had a doctor's office visit between the two hospitalizations.

Advice to people who are leaving the hospital: Make sure you see your primary care provider right away, and make sure he or she knows you've just left the hospital.

Thanks to Jocelyn and Nikki.