Just a rant about the staff
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| Sun, 11-30-2008 - 10:46pm |
So I just need to vent about some stuff going on.
My husband is being treated at the Simon Cancer Center at IU Medical Center in Indianapolis. He's seeing the doctor who treated Lance Armstrong, which is great because he's the guy who came up for all of the treatments for testicular cancer. What's irking me is some of the staff here at the establishment!
First of all they have a valet parking service which is nice except that they charge you $5 every time you get your car back from them and if you stay overnight it's another $5, even if you're coming back that same day. SO the way that my husband and I are doing it is that I stay overnight with him in the hospital. I have my suitcase here, I shower here, eat here, etc. so for me to park my car with the service the entire time (even if they only have to bring the car back ONCE when he is discharged) they'll charge us about $200 for 2 weeks. SO freaking messed up. I'm not working, my husband isn't working....who the hell has that kind of money to dish out for parking?
Secondly about the valet employees themselves: they don't seem to realize that they are working at a hospital. Everytime I go out there I'm leered at, hit on while I'm standing in the cold waiting for my car, or given snotty comments by some hideous woman who thinks that since she's in charge of the service she gets to talk down to me. The biggest incident with her was when I was bringing my husband in a few weeks ago to be admitted. We pulled into the valet driveway and it was extremely busy. Cars were everywhere. I guess they were running a little behind that morning and there was absolutely no place to park except to stay where I was at the end of the driveway. So we get out of the car, me carrying suitcases and my husband wearing a mask and with a bald head, and start walking into the hospital. She stops me and says in an extremely rude tone right off the bat "next time, don't block the driveway or I'll have your car towed". I'm not a morning person and it's not even daylight yet so I snap back "Well where the hell am I supposed to put the car? There's no place to park. Maybe you should get off your ass and move some". I don't usually talk like that to people who are older than me, but in this case (and my husband agrees), she completely deserved what she got and probably a lot more. I mean, excuse me, but my husband is clearly a patient here. You can't talk to us like that.
Some of the nurses here are somewhat less than competent, to put it mildly. You can tell which ones have certifications and which ones have bachelor's degrees in nursing. Yesterday for example, my husband was given a dosage of zofran and the doctor who wrote the orders told us that we could get him more of it in 6 hours if we needed. He was supposed to be on a 6 hour schedule anyways. So the evening goes on and he starts to feel like he needs the medicine and so we ask for it and we're flat out refused it by our nurse. He says there are no orders for it so we decide to get a different medicine and talk to the doctor about it in the morning. Well, this morning the doctor sounded shocked and appalled that my husband couldn't have his medicine and insisted that she had written the orders for it. I don't know what actually happened but I place blame with the nurse that evening because he couldn't be bothered to double check or to call the oncall doctor to get the orders fixed the way they should have been.
This is only a fraction of what we have been put through by the staff here. It's so frustrating because dealing with a husband in treatment and making sure he gets his meds on time and that the nurses don't kill him is stressful enough without beeing leered at and hit on everytime I go outside the wing or to the cafeteria to get a drink. It's ridiculous and it's exhausting!

I'm glad you felt you could come here and vent!
This is the deal with the parking:
The hospital that we're at is located on a college campus. All of the grounds are owned by the university, and not by the hospital. The hospital doesn't have any parking lots or garages that they control and so they have to abide by the unversity's rules regarding parking. Basically if you want to go to the hospital you have to either A) park in the garage and pay up to $9.00 per day (even for a simple Dr.'s office visit, which usually lasts about an hour you'll pay $3.00) or B) use the Valet parking.
I've asked about getting a parking pass from the hospital or the university but it's not possible because the hospital employees have to do the same thing about parking as the patients and their families do and I can't get a pass from the university because I'm not enrolled here.
I've talked to a social worker about this and all they can do is give me a coupon book from the gift shop for $1.00 off the parking garage per day. This still doesn't save me enough money for it to be worth it.
I don't think there's anything the chaplain services can do about the treatment we receive here. And as far as support and talking to someone about this, my family back home knows what's going on (although I don't give as much detail to my Mother-In-Law about this because she's completely irrational when it comes to her son and would completely freak out and get on the next flight out here which would just be a waste of her time and money and would be a huge stress on me that I don't need.) My mother is coming out to this area of the country this weekend for a business trip and is working in a couple days with us here at the hospital. She's definitely the kind of no-nonsense woman you don't want to cross and so I'm hoping that maybe she'll be able to help me in getting my frustrations across to the nursing staff here. I'm the same way that my mother is, but like you said, it IS about my age. I'm only 21 and my husband is only 23 so even though most of the nursing staff is younger too, they don't take me seriously because, how could someone my age possibly know what I'm talking about in a situation as serious as this?
I just have to watch my husband closely and make sure they're not injecting him with anything he's allergic to. (They don't read the charts here and they've almost given him a couple things that we put on his allergy list!) I'm just afraid that this same treatment is happening to other patients on the wing who are older and whose families can't always be with them to make sure that nothing bad is happening to them.
I have been known to park on the street to avoid charges too.