Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] On the day that my 81 year old dad finally had his BP shunt surgery for MPH, the plan was really simple. We get him to the hospital before the sun even comes up.
[00:00:16] He has a quick CT scan just to confirm everything that's going on. He heads to the or, we're going to survive the waiting room and then he's going to be admitted for observation overnight.
[00:00:28] That's simple, right? Just get through the steps. But instead I ended up getting electrocuted by an outlet, investigated by the facilities department of the hospital system and sent to the ER as a patient. Because apparently life in the sandwich lane means your dad gets brain surgery and you get an EKG on the same ticket. Maybe it's more like a BOGO special.
[00:00:50] So let me back up here.
[00:00:52] It's 4:45 in the morning because of course it is. That's the exact hour that hospitals love my dad, like I mentioned, and I mentioned in the last episode, he has nph, which means he has much too much fluid on his brain and a VP shunt's going in to drain it. And hopefully that will just going to help him walk better, think clearer.
[00:01:12] Everything just kind of turn back the clock. So we've been waiting for this surgery for months. He fell into a parked car last year. Didn't tell anybody for a while except his friend who was with him, who saw it and when took him to the doctor. They did an MRI and came back with this diagnosis. And it was something I'd never heard of before, but it kind of made sense. Things have been slowing down for him.
[00:01:36] So I'm an only child, so I'm the default project manager for everything. Mom and dad. My daughter helps me a lot. She's going to be a junior in college and she started nursing school so it'll be all me when school gets started. But she's a big help right now, so. So my husband and I, we pick them up in the dark. Everyone's a little anxious, no one's really slept because we're all afraid of oversleeping. And we head to the hospital like we're reporting for duty. We're going to get through these steps.
[00:02:03] So I have my bag with my snacks, my charger chargers, my notebook, my laptop, because you know me, I'm going to knock out a whole day's worth of work even though everybody knows I'm going to be out and I'm going to get ahead.
[00:02:16] So here we go. Dad goes back for surgery. And honestly that part went as well as brain surgery could go.
[00:02:24] And they come out and they say, everything looks great. He's going to start waking up soon. We don't see any issues.
[00:02:33] Give it a few weeks. We'll see you back in the office.
[00:02:36] Things should get better. And we are all just like, oh, thank you, Lord. So. But the problem starts after, when he's in recovery. And I'm not exaggerating. He was there for seven hours in recovery because there's no beds. He was a little groggy, but he's, like, yelling out to the nurses, hey, can you bring me another drink? You got any snacks back here? Can I just go home?
[00:02:54] And the whole recovery room was packed. The floors upstairs were packed. I don't know what was going on. Probably because we live in Greenville, South Carolina. So many people have moved here. It's really putting pressure on the healthcare system around here.
[00:03:07] So my mom and I are in the waiting room. My daughter was there for a while. She left to go take a CPR class.
[00:03:13] My husband was there.
[00:03:15] We're getting ready to send him home, or I'm asking him to go home to let out the dogs and check on things.
[00:03:21] And we've just been sitting there forever, and every. Every chair is getting uncomfortable, and we keep shifting around, and I keep checking my phone, and I'm thinking about, we've got all this stuff going on. We're in this bright white waiting room. Everything's uncomfortable. I'm just. I'm just ready for him to.
[00:03:41] To get into a room and things can settle down, and we kind of figure out the rest of the day.
[00:03:46] So this is where the story kind of turns.
[00:03:48] So I said, you know what? My phone's getting low, and my phone is always low. I am not the person in the family who keeps their phone charged at 90%. I am living on the edge at 8% and starting to sweat it that I need to find a charger. I've used my husband's charger earlier, but he had taken it out when we moved seats because he's responsible.
[00:04:08] And my mom goes, oh, you can use my charger. Well, she needs a lightning charger because her iPhone's a little bit older. I need a C port because I have 17.
[00:04:18] So my husband's like, I'll hand you my charger. You just swap them out in the wall and you can use the C4 charger again and get your phone juiced up before we head up to the room and all that. And I reach back, which I don't know why I did this, because I'm very careful about things that are electrical.
[00:04:37] I reach back kind of between this love seat and I'm going for the outlet, and I feel the cube. And I reach down, and all of a sudden I feel this zap, but it won't let go. And it goes on for a couple seconds. My arm is buzzing, my finger is burning, and I'm finally able to let go.
[00:04:55] And I realize there's a piece of metal broken off under the. Under the plug. Somebody just broke something off and left the prongs there.
[00:05:04] And I'm like, oh, my gosh. I just got shocked.
[00:05:07] And my husband, he doesn't react to anything. There's never an emergency. He is so calm. He's like, what?
[00:05:15] You got shocked? You okay?
[00:05:18] And he said, I saw you jump kind of quickly. And my mom goes into mama bear mode. She sees my face, and she's like, I'm gonna take care of this. And she goes over and talks to a nurse who comes over, and then, like, a nurse manager comes over and. And the next thing you know, they're writing down my name, and they're going to fill out an incident report. And they're like, do you need to go to the er? I'm like, no, I don't need to go to the er. I just got shot on an outlet.
[00:05:44] I should have looked, but there shouldn't have been prongs hanging out of there either. Good thing it wasn't a kid who didn't stick something over there in that outlet.
[00:05:52] Then engineering shows up, and then they have some electrician guy show up, and he gets the prongs out. And I'm like, these singers going through my body now. It's been 30 minutes, 45 minutes. I have this burn line coming up on my finger where I grabbed it. My husband's like, why don't you go get checked out? And the lady across from me is like, please go get checked out. I've been sitting here watching you, and I can tell you just don't feel right. Please go get checked out. I'm like, it's an outlet. What am I going to do? And so then my mom's like, yeah, I think you need to get checked out.
[00:06:22] And people are coming around the corner trying to figure out what's going on. So my mother goes around the corner and into the waiting. The other section of the waiting room and basically has a press conference and tells everybody what's going on. She's 80 years old. She acts out the whole thing for them, and then she finds out all the stuff about these People and where they went to high school and where they're going to college and why they're in the waiting room. And I'm just sitting there wanting to disappear. And so finally I'm like, you know what? I'll go to the yard just in case.
[00:06:52] So I start kind of getting my stuff together. My mom comes back and reports on everybody that she's met in the waiting room and they all think I should go to the the er. And I said, I think I'm gonna go. So she goes and gets the nurse, somebody from the nurses station and they get somebody to walk me down to the er. And they must not have thought it was bad because they said, yeah, please come get checked out. But I walked all the way down with my big old computer rolling briefcase thing and went through there and I think they were kind of worried about liability. And I thought, I feel like I'm overreacting, but I don't know.
[00:07:25] So I get down to the ER and they just kind of dump me off and leave.
[00:07:30] And if you've ever been in the Greenville Memorial, downtown Greenville Hospital er, it's a shit show. It's just people everywhere. And I'm sure it's like this everywhere. I'm not dinging them at all. But it was a mess.
[00:07:45] And maybe one person knew I was supposed to be there, but no one did. They did take me back to triage and they hooked me up, they asked me all these questions and they hooked me up for an ekg and I'm like, oh my God. Gosh, this is so crazy. My dad's had so many heart problems now I'm starting to freak out and I'm like, how long am I going to be? My dad's recovering from brain surgery. I'd like to go back up there. I think he's getting moved to a room. They hook me up to ekg, a blood pressure cuff and an oxygen thing, and they shut the door and leave me in a room with no windows and it's hot and I'm starting to go through menopause and it was probably 85 degrees in that room. And when I get hot, I don't just walk around having hot flashes, but if I get hot, that's when the gloves come off.
[00:08:30] I have a full blown panic attack on the little gurney thing, the little mini stretcher in the triage room and I start pulling all the wires off and trying to rip the blood pressure cuff and pulling the oxygen thing off. And the lady walks me back in and she's like, what are you doing?
[00:08:48] And I was like, I gotta get out of here. It is hot. I need to just get back upstairs. And now that I've had this full panic attack, I'm not having these little electrical zinger zingers come through me anymore. I feel better.
[00:09:01] And she says, well, actually, through all that, your EKG looks good, but we can see you pretty much had a panic attack right in the middle of it, so we need to go find a doctor and see if you can leave.
[00:09:13] And I'm like, what? Can I just sit in here? She's like, oh, no, it's too hot in here for you. You got to go to the waiting room. I'm like, oh, geez, please.
[00:09:21] So now I'm out there with everybody in the wheelchairs and the people screaming and the people crying, and you're having to, like, step over people to get to a seat. And then they call me up and they want to run this through my insurance, and I'm like, no, this is not an insurance gig. This is the hospital's fault for having prongs broken off in an outlet. Don't touch my insurance. Well, we still need to know that you have insurance. I'm like, let's pretend like I don't. Well, you're in the system, and we see that you do. I said, but I'm not authorizing you to charge my insurance. So now we have to keep an eye on that.
[00:09:57] And I realized I'm going to be sitting there a while. So I just went back and stood at the nurse's desk, at the triage desk, and I was not rude, but they said, we need to take your BP again, and we need to check your vitals and all that because you had a high heart rate and your blood pressure was up, so it had come down. It still wasn't ideal, but it had been a long day.
[00:10:18] Like, you can go. Your EKG was fine, even with a panic attack in it. So I felt pretty good about that.
[00:10:24] So, thankfully, with all that going on, while that's going on, they move my dad to a room. So my mom's with my dad in the room.
[00:10:34] I wheel myself back up, and my dad's like, where you been? I'm like, oh, my gosh.
[00:10:39] So tell him the story. He's still kind of out of it from being put to sleep. Sleep. And it was just kind of nuts because the day was all about him. And then it turned into this drama, and I was completely embarrassed.
[00:10:53] And thinking back, I probably shouldn't have gone to the er. But my luck, something could have happened if I didn't, who knows?
[00:11:01] Anyway, so here's why I'm telling you all this. This is really kind of what the sandwich lane looks like in real life. I'm the one who feels like they're trying to hold it all together and manage both ends, but sometimes you're in the messy middle and you kind of end up being the issue. So, you know, I was trying to be the steady grown up for everybody. There's three generations hanging out trying to get my dad through brain surgery, and my body was just like, no, you're having zingers. You've had a lot. Go on. And I ended up in the er. So I don't know, maybe it just shows that if you're the caregiver, you're not invincible. We can still get shocked or scared or overwhelmed and overheated, which does happen.
[00:11:44] And stress is not just big stuff like surgery.
[00:11:49] Stress is waiting, not knowing, feeling responsible for everyone else, sitting in a contaminated waiting room in a hospital er.
[00:12:01] And sometimes I think it's okay if you finally just tap out and say, I'm done. So when I got up to dad's room, I just plop down in the chair for a little bit and just.
[00:12:10] Just relax for a little while. So I don't know.
[00:12:14] So that's my crazy story. Dad is okay.
[00:12:17] I will follow up with this. Three days after surgery, he wakes up and he has a wire sticking out of the back of his ear. He didn't have any stitches there. No one had talked about sutures. We spent five hours back in the ER yesterday where they determined that they had used a staple to tack down a drape during his surgery. And. And I guess it was covered in blood and we didn't see it. So he. They took a staple remover and popped that staple out of him yesterday. So all is well as of this second.
[00:12:47] So if you're listening to this and you've had your inversion of this day, maybe not quite like this, but your own version, just realize you're really not being dramatic. You're just carrying a lot, and sometimes things just kind of go haywire.
[00:13:03] So that's it for this week. I'm not really giving any crazy advice or talking about lessons learned that much, just something nutty that happened in the hospital, and I hope that maybe you got a laugh out of it. And I'll be back next week with another story about life in the sandwich lane.
