Posted on 08/08/2007 3:52:48 PM PDT by Blood of Tyrants
A grandfather died after a blister caused by tight new shoes led to blood poisoning and massive organ failure. Peter Catterall, 60, was given dressings by a district nurse and told the sore on his toe should heal by itself.
But just over a week later, the retired electrician suffered two heart attacks.
[snip]
But according to his youngest daughter, Sara, 21, the sore continued to weep, and when she went to see him a week later on July 1 he confessed: "This toe is killing me."
Miss Catterall said yesterday: "I am no nurse, but I immediately knew he had septicaemia because my mum had had it before.
"There was a hole in his foot. I told him he had to go to the doctor but he said: 'They have discharged me'."
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
My father just recently passed away. He was a veteran of the Korean conflict and went to the VA for his medical care. The first week of March of this year my father was either bitten or got a scratch on his forehead. This was on a Saturday. My sister went to visit him and noticed that the sore was getting bigger and quite red and puffy. She wanted him to go to the hospital to have it checked and he told her that he had an appointment for the next day, Monday.
He went to the hospital for his appointment and the doctor there told him that he was having an allergic reaction to the bug bite and sent him home. The sore on his face was spreading and by Wednesday my brother begged him to go back to the hospital...but my dad refused because it was just an allergy.
The next morning they found my father unconscious on his bedroom floor...so they called for an ambulance which took him to another hospital...NOT the VA. My sister left that afternoon, my father was now talking and wanting to get out of there..in the meantime my husband and I were preparing to make the trip out to the hospital to visit him.
I got there around 7:30...the doctor had just been with the family to talk about dad’s condition. Everyone was in tears..my father was now in a coma and they told us his only hope was to remove all the flesh from his face...he had Necrotizing Fasciitis...the flesh eating disease. His facial tissue was now dead..his head the size of a basketball...He was unrecognizable. The infection had gone down into his chest.
The doctor told me that this disease was quite rare...and I told him my daughter’s mother in law had just had half her abdomen and leg removed for the same reason. he seemed genuinely stunned.
We opted to take my father off life support...as we knew he would not want to live so grossly disfigured..and the odds of him living through the surgery weren’t good to begin with. We took him off the vent at 9 pm...no goodbyes...no I love you’s. He passed 7 minutes later.
It’s hard to believe that a bug bite or scratch could kill someone in such a short time...but it can and does happen.
Someone talked about socialized medicine...my father may not have died if the VA had taken their time to do a culture on my fathers swollen face.
I won’t even talk about the prostate cancer that was never treated for 6 years because no one bothered to look at his chart. he had a rough go of it for a while but he was cancer free when he died.Right now I don’t have a good thing to say about the VA...
Story:
The divorced father of three, who was on medication for heart problems and chronic asthma....
I would lay good money that the guy had undiagnosed diabetes, to boot.
Charming. Perhaps you’ve never seen a small medical condition become serious, regardless you’d do well to think a bit before you mouth off.
I’m sorry for your loss.
At least NEW ones....
What a horror story. G-D comfort your family.
Sympathy and prayers for your loss.
It doesn’t surprise me that Peter Catterall was given poor service for his foot ailment. I have suffered from a lot of foot conditions including sprained ankles, in-grown toe nails, plantus fasciatus and blisters, etc, and always the NHS practitioners were initially dismissive of my problems. I think the NHS has a very low opinion/priority for foot conditions because they deem them to be very low risk (to life).
I'm "in the business"...and have very few good things to say about the VA system.
That said...hindsight being what it is...many don't think about the potential for small sores..etc to turn into extremely serious situations...and delay treatment.
Heck..I'm just as bad as the next guy. And like I said...I "see" this stuff.
Human nature?
I dunno....
Again....I'm so sorry for your loss. I've been there.
To boot? A tight boot?
Correction, he died later than that, 1914, I think. The book was about a train wreck in 1910.
Well.....for what it's worth...I've had patients complain of all sorts of maladies...and blame the hospital, the Insurance companies, etc...yet they weigh 400 lbs, smoke, and are in noncompliance with their meds.
I'm not saying...this "comment" that you've posted is false, or true. I'm just giving you a different point of view.
The initial visit isn’t a good gauge of anything in this case. An infected wound takes time to manifest signs and symptoms. Had this guy gone to a doctor who denied him antibiotics when the infection presented, it would be different. Sadly, there is no one to blame for this but the patient.
Everyone says physicians schedule follow up visits to increase their income, and there is some truth in that, but then you get one of these.
We'll agree to disagree. I would argue that the NHS system, where all doctor visits are "official," helps create a "but I've been discharged" attitude like Caterall's. In a private system, it's psychologically much easier to call up a doctor and tell him there's a problem.
No one would know that the wound was infected until signs of an infection manifested. This takes a couple of days. There’s no issue of ‘standing up to the medical establishment’ here. When the infection started to swell up and stink, he should have gone back to the doctor. Socialized medicine sucks, but the people who are forced to work in its system aren’t monsters. He would have been treated if he had gone back when the infection became apparent.
I stuffed my new shoes with wet towels to stretch them out.
You missed the entire point of my post. I’m upset that the poor guy sat on his keester with a obviously infected toe, and DID NOTHING. Too bad his daughter didn’t catch it earlier.
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