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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Thank God she did: Night shift in the hospital’s intensive care unit

Melinda Henneberger tells the story of her recovery from breast cancer surgery:

My husband wanted to come with me, but I finally persuaded him to stay home, thinking how much scarier it would be for our two kids if we were both gone. But my best friend, Mary, did fly in from Oregon and thank God she did. I was on the table for 12 hours and when I came out, they put me on a morphine drip. Nauseated, I’d start to vomit, then choke. I was thirstier than I’d ever been, but I couldn’t drink anything. Mary was there to feed me ice chips and hold me up when I choked. A few times, we pushed the button for help, but no one responded for quite a while Sometimes they never came at all. If I’d been on my own and choking, I’m not sure how I would have made it through the night.

The night shift staffers were kind and caring, but appeared to be overwhelmed by patients needing attention. I could hear other patients crying out for help that didn’t seem to come. It was horrible listening to them.

Later in the week, when I was able to move around, I fed ice chips to another patient. I stayed up all night with them. It took me half an hour just to get across the room. I was still in a great deal of pain and moving pretty slowly.

The whole thing was Dante-esque.

A spokesperson for the medical center says the hospital assigns one nurse for at least every two patients in the ICU, both night and day.

Melinda’s advice to people having inpatient surgery: By all means, get somebody to stay with you through the night.

Read another of our night stories, or read Max Alexander’s source story in the June 2007 Readers Digest.

1 comment:

Mark Graban said...

That's horrible that hospital administrators don't see that their night shift people are overworked and that patient care is suffering. What do they do, fall back on "ratios" and say "that should be good enough?"