Medical malpractice almost killed me.
I had a persistent cough that kept me up all night. A friend who worked in the medical field told me to go to the emergency room.
The doc examined me and said I had bronchitis and was going to send me home with antibiotics. He left, the nurse came in to give me a once over and she didn’t like what she heard in my chest. She convinced the doc to give me an x-ray. After, the doc says I have pneumonia in both lungs and needed to be admitted for 24 hours for serious antibiotics.
The next day, when they are about to send me home, someone notices that my blood oxygen level has dropped to 70. That got their attention. They did an MRI and discovered I was in the middle of a double pulmonary embolism. I was later told that if they had sent me home, I would have died a couple of hours later.
My grandmother, my sister's mother-in-law, and a longtime close friend who was in her 50s all died after they went to the emergency room after they became dehydrated. Each were small and lightly built and around a 100 pounds. After hospital staff finished giving them the 2nd bag of IV fluid each died within a couple hours of “heart failure”. Hospital staff often forget to take into account that a tiny woman should not get as much IV fluid in a short time as a man or woman who weighs twice as much.
Myself, I had abdominal pain off and on for a couple of weeks. My wife who had worked for decades as a nurse noticed that my completion had changed in a bad way. My wife insisted that I go to the emergency room/ urgent care at our local hospital as soon as they opened in the morning. I sat there for several hours while they let every little kid with the sniffles go ahead of me. They finally took my blood, a few hours later someone finally took a look at the results. They called me back to one of their rooms and said that my white blood cell count was through the roof and that they had called an ambulance to transfer me to a larger hospital where emergency appendicitis surgery could be performed.
I told them no after waiting for 9 hours for them to do something, my wife would take me to the other hospital which they did not like but finally agreed to because I am so stubborn.
I drove my car home, and my wife took me to the other hospital where a surgical team had already been assembled and were waiting for me. Since my appendix had already ruptured the surgery lasted for two hours while they literally cleaned the crap out my abdominal cavity.
The funny thing was how worried the doctors and hospital staff were when they realized that they had left someone with a ruptured appendix sitting in their waiting room all day. I did not actually realize the seriousness of the situation until months later when one of my “probies” (trainees) told me that his dad who was the same age as me and also in good physical condition died suddenly after he had his appendix removed and he developed peritonitis.