An emphasized topic during the Case of Michael Skolnik Video revolved around informed consent. I appreciated our conversations around this topic and couldn’t help but think of a good friend and an issue she encountered in her health care recently. She had been having intense lower abdominal pain for months that had gradually worsened. She recently moved to a new state and hadn’t gotten a new physician yet but eventually sought one out for her pain. When the imaging results were in it was discovered she had multiple ovarian “masses”, one of them the size of a melon. The physician walked in, dropped the diagnosis on her, and then told her she would need to have both of her ovaries removed. He told her that was the standard of care for dealing with this and wanted to move forward with scheduling surgery.

Luckily she is an educated, intelligent person… Continue reading →

I was moved to learn more about patient safety after my mother had an adverse post-operative event in December. To make a long story short (anyone is welcome to talk with me about this in person) she had an internal bleed that was caught late, and then once caught was mistakenly not addressed. She bled in her hospital bed for nearly 2 days, her blood pressure dropped to 75/59 and her hemoglobin was 5.2 g/dL before nurses overstepped the physician and took action themselves. She received 8 units of blood during her recovery. Watching the case of Lewis Blackman I was struck by how many similarities were between his case and my mothers:

• Lewis case occurred over a weekend, my mother’s over Christmas break
• she suffered an internal bleed in the hospital, missed right in front of everyone
• They minimized Lewis issues as “just” constipation, I had a surgeon… Continue reading →