Thursday, July 16, 2009

The myth of the big guns (Part 3)

So, I had decided to try and make the best out of a very troubling situation. At crack o' dawn on Monday morning some poor lab vampire came up and drew my blood for the lithium level. And I met with Dr. Rao for about ten minutes every day so she could assess my progress. At least, I believed she was assessing my progress. I found out differently on Wednesday. I asked, during our meeting if she planned to discharge me that day as she had suggested was possible a few days ago. She replied that my lithium level was too low. Not that she believed me to be a danger to myself or anyone else for that matter. Not that anything she had "assessed" lead her to think I might be unable to function outside. Just that a certain salt in my blood did not meet certain standardized parameters. I wondered what the point of our meetings had been if that was going to be the deciding factor in whether or not I was going home. Or, for that matter, what had been the point of her going to medical school. Hell, I wasn't even a nurse yet and I could read blood test results. One of the first things they teach you as a nurse is to look at the person, not the machines. If the heart monitor says V-tach and the patient is drinking coffee and complaining about the T.V. reception, you do not approach them with defibrillator paddles, you realize that they were moving around and the monitor was screwy. Apparently, they don't share this little hypothetical with soon-to-be doctors. Dr. Rao then added as sort of an after thought that certain staff members had also shared with her that they believed me to be "still emotionally unstable". Funny thing, that, because I had behaved spectacularly on the unit. And when I later asked the nurses and aids their opinion on my stability they told me that I seemed stable enough to them. One even went so far as to roll her eyes and say "Doctors sometimes say things like that." So unless housekeeping had had a heart to heart with Dr. Rao regarding my sanity, she had lied. That wasn't her only lie either. My mother requested a meeting with her to discuss why I was still at the hospital and when she thought I might be able to leave. Dr. Raos' answer was "It takes a week at least to stabilize a patient." Aside from being completely arbitrary and inconsiderate of individual needs, this minimum of Dr. Rao's revealed her "maybe wednesday" statement to be complete bullshit. So now I wasn't just being held against my will, I was being held against my will by someone I couldn't trust. And the real kicker was that this woman's master plan consisted of doing exactly the same thing as was being done on the outside. Her single goal was to get my lithim levels up. That was it. No big guns. Except maybe electro convulsive therapy and I didn't meet the criteria for that. The cherry on top of this marvelous sunday was that about a week into my treatment Dr. Rao left the country. She just went back to India. And she wasn't gonna tell me either. I asked her about it after overhearing her talking with staff. So I was still locked up, and the doctor in charge of letting me out was in another time zone. Now what the fuck was I supposed to do?

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