Posted on 09/29/2007 1:27:44 AM PDT by rawhide
How about false imprisonment? Disgusting!
Uh, I don't want to say it, so I won't.
Simply ridiculous.
Heads should roll.
Woman Left in CT Scanner for Hours
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1903802/posts
“I don’t know what to think,” Tellez said in Spanish
Except that the story says she unlocked the door for the police. If she could do that, how can she claim to be imprisoned?
Yeah. Really.
I would like to see a picture of the CT scanner.
I do a much less rigorous CT Scan every six months. The table on which you lay slides in and out of the machine to cover the area being imaged. You're not really placed inside the thing.
Makes me think the lady is a ditz.
I can accept someone not knowing she was left alone in the thing, but when the story mentioned that she had to unlock the door to let in the people who would let her out, I thought of blonde jokes and jokes about locking your family in the convertible...
Press stories aren’t always accurate. I’ve been in MRI’s, and I can tell you it would take hours to get out of one of those, besides being totally terrifying.
Now a CT scanner is a little less difficult, but a 67 year old with bone cancer probably has trouble getting out of bed, let alone out of an elevated machine.
As others have said, I’d like to see a picture of the scanner. The one I was in, I would have been hard pressed to get out of on my own...it said, iirc, that she had to crawl out of it, that might be easier for some than others. And this lady had bone cancer, God bless her.
I would have regarded myself as trapped, if I had to get out of it on my own.
She WAS locked in the place, may not have known what the unlocking procedure was. Might not have been as simple as a key. I work in an office rented from a church, and let me tell you, the locking/unlocking procedures, when I’m the last one there, had to be taught to me. I’m sure she needed coaching before she could get the door open. And what about alarms? Setting off an alarm without first having the police informed could cause a bit of a fuss, don’t you think?
So, say it happened to you, when you were sick with bone cancer and left to crawl out of a CT scanner on your own, then found out that you were locked in a strange place alone in the dark.
I would regard myself as imprisoned. Anytime you can’t walk out without calling the police, and unlocking the door, you’re imprisoned.
Your mileage may vary, no problem.
I have some sympathy and understanding for the lady at 67 being incapacitated by age and illness. My first scan was an ordeal. I had to be helped onto and off the table.
My left lung was compressed by fluid. When the machine said, “Hold your breath,” I had no breath to hold!
But, if she was that frail and incompacitated, I’m pretty sure she would have had a relative or someone out in the waiting area. She didn’t.
Maybe they went for coffee and forgot about her too. :-)
> I do a much less rigorous CT Scan every six months. The table on which you lay slides in and out of the machine to cover the area being imaged. You’re not really placed inside the thing.
A couple years ago I took an injury — a hard blow in the guts — that required a CT scan to ensure my liver was OK.
My arms were strapped to my side at the time, for support and to help me “not move”, and the table slid in-and-out of this contraption while it whirled away noisily. In while it was working, out when it was finished, then I was free to go.
Doubtless, had I given it much effort, I could have escaped the scanner even with my arms strapped to my sides — it wouldn’t have been difficult for a 265 lb galloot like me... so at no time was I “trapped”. There are no visible moving parts, it was rather relaxing as an experience, as I recall. (I had also been given an injection of a radioactive something-or-other to help with the image: I instantly felt warm and comfortable from head-to-toe — it was much, much better than alcohol — and told them they could do that to me anytime they liked! They said “no, at $900 per shot we do this only once!”)
The scanner costs a small fortune to run, so no clinic is going to keep it running any longer than it needs to. I think it highly unlikely this poor soul was left inside the machine with her arms strapped to her sides to “shake & bake” while the contraption wirrrred away sending dangerous radioactivity coursing thru her body for hours on end...
More likely, the test was over with in a few minutes, the clinicians finished for the day, slid her out of the machine, and assumed that she would do the sensible thing of changing out of the gown into her normal street clothes and leaving.
In the interim, she may have fallen asleep.
So I gotta wonder about this story of being “trapped” in the CT scanner and being “locked” in the clinic...
Didn’t she try calling the staff? It’s not like the lab is soundproof and the clinicians are deaf...
I still care came up with a plausible expanation.
It might have been an MRI and not a CT scan. Never been in one, myself.
Like you, an intervenous contrast solution was administered. I wondered whether part of the problem getting free, if it was a CT, was getting up the nerve to remove the catheter.
My husband had a multitude of scans the last year, and not one involved a catheter.
> It might have been an MRI and not a CT scan. Never been in one, myself.
(Grin!) I’ve been in an MRI, too. And rather like when I took the First Degree of Freemasonry, I was also divested of all metals...
(dunno why — maybe the “Magnetic” part of “MRI” has something to do with it!)
I think those hospital rides are fun, sorta like Disneyland with funny clothes on! Come to think of it, the best vacations I have ever had have involved going to hospital for a couple weeks...
*DieHard*
They’ll probably bill her for an overnight stay.
She could unlock the door. She could call for help. Perhaps they should look at the CT scan and see if this woman has a brain.
I’ll bet the third call she made was to a lawyer. She sees a pay day coming, and the hospital will just charge the paying patients another arm and leg.
Having worked with some of these CT techs, I can’t say I’m surprised :)
It really depends on bore size. Some machines will be tigher fits than others. (And some patients are fatter than others... don't know whether that was part of the problem here.) In any event, a 67 year old cancer patient is likely to be a bit less spry physically. As for the table, yes it slides, but usually the technician has to do it manually or remotely. In this case, of course, the tech forgot all about the patient in the first place. So, it's really not hard to understand why she'd have a difficult time extracting herself..
I would say the level of incompetence shown at this facility deserved a rather large settlement. How the hell can a patient be left in the damn machine. What! The attendant didn’t have time. Must have been Friday.
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