Oh, goodness! I HATE THIS KIND OF THING! {Rant ahead.} The nurses pulled that kind of crap on me too, only it was that they couldn’t take care of patients during shift change. And when I said I was having problems they said, “Well you know, we have a LOT of paperwork to do during shift changes! You must be depressed.” No, I was being neglected, not being depressed.

But of course, the Almighty Hospital Routine must take precedence. “The rules say we only check blood pressure at certain times, and we do not deviate from those times, even if your wife is passed out on the floor.”

(Oh,and my other favorite story–a nurse took a blood pressure reading from my stepfather’s grandmother **after she had died** because it was time to do so. The woman was DEAD and they still hooked her up to the blood pressure cuff because, well, it was time.)

……………………………….

So we’re expected to be inside a “sterile” (which it’s not) building monitored by machines/people/machines even if what’s going on is perfectly fine and normal and natural and has no need of intervention-JUST IN CASE intervention is needed. Then, because of routines and schedules, when help IS needed, we’re beholden to a mechanical time divider on the wall.

I’m glad there was someone else around to actually help when help was needed!

Holy ****! A woman passed out and they refused to check her blood pressure for three hours? Why the heck are we “supposed” to birth in hospitals if they refuse to help an unconcious woman.

Kudos to her hubby for insisting that SOMEONE help her. What if she didn’t have a partner and was laboring alone? I shudder to think about it.

You know, the nursing field saw too much growth too quickly. In my state, all you need to do to enter the program is have an ACT of 19 or higher and a passing score on the dosage test (which is a bit like fractions/decimals/pre-alg).

My regular classes in highschool already surpassed the biology/microbio/ap/chem they required to get licensed.

Grrr

Wow, what a crappy nurse! As an RN myself, we do our routine vital signs and ADDITIONAL VITALS if the patient’s condition changes (complaining of shortness of breath, sudden change of consciousness, and certainly passing out). That nurse was just lazy, and that’s scary.

The only thing that surprises me here is that the nurse even answered, rather than just ignoring the situation until shift change. All the times I have been hospitalized — pregnancy-related or not — the one constant has been nurses who ignore repeated calls for help. When I was hospitalized for DVT, and using a bed pan because I couldn’t get out of bed, I spilled the bed pan. It took *an hour* for the nurse to send someone to clean up the mess, while I was stuck lying in my own urine. When I had a c-section with my first baby, I lay in bed crying, struggling to stay awake and calling the nurses with the call button over and over for 45 minutes, begging someone to help me because I was falling asleep, couldn’t sit up to set my son in the bassinet, and the nurses had drilled it into my head that if I held my baby while sleeping in those “high, narrow” hospital beds, I’d drop him off the bed and he’d be killed.

Of course, my examples pale in comparison with what happened to my husband’s grandmother. My husband arrived for a visit to find that his grandmother was having a heart attack, had been calling the nurses over and over, and they were ignoring her. They told my husband that nothing was wrong with her, she was just whining about chest pains. Well, YEAH — she was having a HEART ATTACK!

This is my story. It will be 13 years ago next month. I don’t remember except what my husband told me of the events. The dr was a real piece of work, too. After they got me back and stable, my husband told the DR no more meds. We’d take the risks associated with a preemie. I was 33 weeks. The dr said he didn’t care about the mother, he only cared about the baby! Can you imagine?? At this point, my husband threatened to punch him if he even came near me again. He said “I can make another baby. I can’t make another wife.” My husband had my medical power of attorney (VERY important) and signed paperwork declining further treatment. He watched the dr walk away and throw the papers in the garbage. Did I mention what an a$$ this dr was? The next day, I started having “complications”…the same complications that had me in the hospital for the previous two weeks…yet suddenly they were bad enough that I had to be delivered. After a whopping 6 hours of labor, I gave birth to my son. The nurses were shocked because most of that dr’s patients ended up with c-sections. Thank goodness for fast labors! I have since gone on to have 5 more term births (with very fast labors) and to discover that I am *always* 3 cm and 75 percent effaced and contracting regularly by 33 weeks. So there was never really any problem…just my body doing it’s thing.

So, there’s the rest of the story!

Oh Micki that is terrible. I know exactly hoe this feels because I had my last OB ever say to me – on the phone – “I don’t care about you! I only care about your baby!”, in order to get my *consent* for a c-section. It makes your head swim and the room tilt to realise that this person who is supposed to be helping you actually seem to HATE you. You can guess that I ended up with a forced c. It would have gone unknown if not for that complaint!

He threw the papers in the GARBAGE?! Holy &*@^!

Some of these stories remind me of things …. how when I worked in a pharmacy we supplied nursing homes with drugs, and one nurse overdosed a patient with Morphine and killed him because she didn’t read the decimal point correctly. When my own grandmother was in rehab for a knee replacement, they gave the poor woman two Darvocet (even though she’s never had drugs or alcohol in her entire life) and she passed out, while I was on the phone with her from two states away. I thought she was dying while I was on the phone with her! My mom – who’s a respiratory therapist – was flipping out trying to get someone’s attention, and they were pretty nonchalant about it. That sucks.

It’s sad that the morons in the this profession overshadow those who are perfectly competent and caring.

Were they giving you Procardia, by chance? A heart medication, not approved for use on pregnant women, but used off-label to stop preterm label, one of it’s side effects is that it lowers blood pressure. Probably not something to give to someone who doesn’t already have high blood pressure. /

I’m sorry you were treated so poorly, but I’m so glad to hear you went on to have more pleasant birthing experiences.