verushka70

Well, the pathology report for my mom's "specimens" (i.e. the lower lobe of her R lung, all 20 lymph nodes and the section removed from the upper R lobe came back. We're told that the upper lobe nodule wasn't cancer, it was actually a fungal infection. That's the good news.

The bad news is that 3 of the lymph nodes were involved. 1 of them is in the mediastinum, near the heart/esophagus/trachea and in between the 2 lungs... which, we're told, isn't good. Also, there were multiple foci (3, to be exact) of cancer in the lower R lobe, not just the one that showed up on the CT, X-ray, and PET scan. So that's bad. No one will say exactly how bad; they're giving vague generalities. But lymph node involvement and multiple sites can't be good, when it comes to cancer.

I don't know if I'm just being a neurotic nursing student, but some stuff has happened while my mom's in the hospital that has made me think the nurses at this place, and the hospital in general, have become shitty over the last few years since they got taken over by Resurrection. For one thing, the nurse who put my mom's IV in preoperatively left a HUGE (like 2 inches long!) air bubble in the tubing, and as I watched it go into my mother's wrist through the IV site, I said to her, "Is that supposed to be there?!" and she said, "Oh, it's fine, it won't hurt her." Meanwhile, I'm thinking, if I had done that in school or in a clinical, my teachers would have failed me right then and there. wtf??

Then, after they transferred her from the ICU to the TCU (Transitional), the transport guys just left her in her room... and no one, not one health care worker, came to see her for over an hour. Again, I say... WTF?! When you get a new patient -- so I've been taught! -- you at LEAST go introduce yourself to them, even if you're busy with a complicated patient somewhere else. At least let them know that you know they are there! Not to mention someone should have come in to take her vital signs within at least the first hour, I would think.

Also, the unit doc told my mom yesterday that someone would ambulate her (walk with her) in the hallways and they'd also do stairs with her. Well, they didn't walk with her, the RN just told her to get up and walk. For someone on the amount of Vicodin and Tylenol w/codeine that my mom is, and the fact that she's older and totally unused to these drugs, that's not really safe. (Not to mention, if I'd ever done something like that in school during clinicals, I'd have been failed.) And no one ever did the stairs with her at all.

Lastly, and most frighteningly, when the surgeon came to take out my mom's chest tubes, he asked the RN there to get him a suture removal kit. The RN came back with two gauze pads and some tape! So the surgeon snapped, "I said a suture removal kit, dammit!" So again I'm going, WTF!? This clown doesn't even know what a suture removal kit is... should he be my mother's nurse? Even the surgeon was ticked off, which seemed ominous to me.

We thought she'd be coming home today (and my mom certainly WANTED TO), but it was not to be. Her oxygen saturation was down too low today, so the pulmonologist said No way to going home. My mom was terribly disappointed. She's bored, she hates being in the hospital, and she just wants to come home. So they put her back on oxygen today. She might not get to come home tomorrow, either; it depends on how the broncoscopy and suction they have scheduled tomorrow will go. If they go well, they'll send her home. If not, she's stuck in the hospital 'til Friday at least.

Sigh.