Mental | Ah, What a day

State of Healthcare since COVID

Sat, 28 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few months I have been in and out of the hospital a lot. So, I’m going to be explaining why I wanted to talk about this…

Ambulances

Each hospitalization starts with a trip to the ER via ambulance. Why an ambulance? Well, by the time I admit I need help, I’m not able to drive myself. It’s usually because of the amount of pain I’m in. While sometimes the ambulance ride ends up a positive experience (the best you can have in that situation)… Sometimes has been lackluster, at best. Seems like the care factor has been on a steady decline since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Most of the times, I have been delivered to the waiting room instead of actually being cared for. During the ride, they refuse to give any assistance, and the reason I have gotten is that they don’t want to make it worse. I usually ask for pain medication and/or something for the nausea. While I understand the pain medication can make a intestinal blockage worse, and I would completely understand if that’s what I have been experiencing. With the # of times I have been through this, I’m pretty sure I know what to do/expect. Trust would go along way with the patients and the paramedics.

Hospitals

Once arriving at the hospital, if I’m able to get into the ER in a timely manner…. The nurses and doctors do the best they can, but with what they see on he CT scans, they think it’s a blockage. I’ll talk about this in a minute. For the # of nurses that they have on hand, there isn’t enough to care for the patients adequately. I heard the ER nurses state that she had 5-6 patients on average. Then on the floors, they are in the ball park of 7-8 patients. Now, this might not seem like a lot, but if you take into consideration that if a 2-3 patients need extra care, the others go uncared for. From what I have seen, it’s VERY rare that other nurses step into help them out. Which is understandable, to a degree. While the nurses do not have the experience with the patients, they can quickly get up to speed to a limited degree. Is this possibly dangerous? Yes, it is to a degree, but if they are following medication orders or something of that nature, it should be relatively safe to administer.

Doctors

While I’m in the ER, I am normally assigned a doctor or two, and it’s pretty amazing how quick they make conclusions. In the last 2 times I was in the hospital; they were VERY insistent on me having surgery. Both times, it’s not to fix a problem, but to go have a look at the problem. From my experience, exploratory doesn’t really help anything, but to allow for the doctors to see what potentially is a problem. I have had this before, and they said it was going to be a small incision. I woke up with a ~6 inch scar which now looks like a question mark around my belly button. Not to mention the damage they did to my bladder. Let me tell you, avoid vertical surgeries on your stomach at all costs, they hurt like hell and are hard to recover from. What is even better about the doctors, when they finally see that I’m not going to allow for surgery, they drop me like a hot potato. This has happened on two occasions, and they were from different lines of doctors and different specialties.

Second Opinions

Through my work, I was able to get a second opinion which might potentially lead to something life altering for myself. This second opinion was with a doctor in Alabama at a university that specializes in Gastro Intestinal Issues. I was finally able to get my GI doctor to look at the opinion, and he took it to heart and tested some of the items. This resulted in finding that my Thyroid is under active, and I also have a VERY low B12 #. Since that test, I have been doing B12 sublingually and started a Thyroid medication. Through researching these two problems, they BOTH can cause a multitude of problems with my mental health and gastro intestinal system.

I know I have said multiple times that I want to block more regularly… Hopefully that will start happening. It’s hard for me to sit down, and talk about these problems when I feel half-way decent. These times have been rough for me, and this is a form of therapy. I also hope this helps someone else.

Mental Health awareness and professional compassion

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What does it mean to be aware of your mental health?

There are so many aspects of the mental health of people. Just to list a few: sleep, physical activity, physical health, sun light, medication. Most people don’t realize that your physical health is directly tied to your mental health. Here is a story of a friend of mine that I met in IOP. I’m not giving names, to protect the identity of that individual.

G was a high profile sales person, and he was used to living on the road. Always on the go, with a large family at home. When he started having sleeping problems, he wasn’t aware of what was happening. Turns out, G was in pain from a back injury. When I met him, he was just coming out of Copestone mental ward, and he was in agony with pain. His back was in bad shape, and the amount of pain he was in, was visible. Little did he know, he had been going downhill for sometime, and with the amount of pain he was in, his sleep was being disturbed. Eventually it got to a breaking point, and he wasn’t able to control himself anymore. That’s when he was escorted to Copestone, and that’s when he was forcefully shown the error of his thinking. Once it was clear as to what was needed, he got the help that was vital to his mental health getting better. There is another aspect that he didn’t know about. He was misdiagnosed by several doctors prior, which put him on medications that made his bi-polar disorder worse, instead of helping it. Now, he’s happy and fairly healthy, but he had to go through that whole process to get the help he needed.

What’s the meaning of the story?

Well, it highlights how important two things are, physical health and proper diagnosis. If a bipolar disorder goes untreated, it can cause a multitude of problems. I don’t know the statistics, but there are some people that are bipolar which end up dead due to suicide. This fact is just sad in my book. We have all of this medical knowledge, but we are still losing people due to malpractice and/or lack of compassion.

Improper Diagnosis/Improper medication

With all of the professionals and all of the advancements of the mental health area. It’s still surprising to me how many still get a improper diagnosis. This can be tricky in some cases, but there are a lot of cut and dry cases which should be fairly easy to pin point. As far as medications, there are DNA tests which show what medications work with your body. If you are having problems with medications, you can easily find a clinic that offers that. Just keep searching for a clinic that offers DNA testing for mental medications. There are places that offer this, and most insurances cover this.

Lack of compassion

Me next point, compassion. This should be common sense that in the medical field you need to have some high level of compassion, but much to my dismay, it’s not that common. A lot of medical professionals are just there for the money, they stopped caring about patients somewhere along the professional path. I don’t know if it’s because there are so many people that need help OR the institution of making money on people’s ill fortune. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of professionals out there that truly want to help people, and to those people, my hat goes off to you. So far in my journey, I have met a few doctors that have a lot of compassion, and more nurses and PAs that have that level of compassion.

Reach out - be a friend

If you see someone in need, don’t be afraid to reach out and help. Even if it’s a phone call saying “Hey I’m thinking about you, and how are you doing?” That simple phone call could save someone’s life.

What led up to my Copestone hospitalization.......

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There were several factors that weighed in on the decision to commit myself to Copestone Mental Hospital.

All my life, I have suffered from depression and anxiety. I didn’t realize this until I started going through the IOP/PHP program that is part of Mission Hospitals, bought out by HCA.

IOP stands for Intensive Outpatient Program. PHP stands for Partial Hospitalization Program. In a later blog post, I will be detailing my experiences through both PHP and IOP.

Anyways…. with my depression and anxiety never really under control, this created a good base for anything ‘crazy’ to stick. Along with my constant negative self talk and self criticism. It’s true, we are our own worst critics. This all help put me in a place to where I was ‘ready’ for this to become a problem.

The start of 2019, was very exciting for me. We had just finished building my house and getting a Certificate of Occupation approved in early November of 2018. I moved in around 1/1/2019. This was a huge change for myself as well as my dad. We had been living together for the better part of our lives. At the first, it was awkward, but it seemed to be settling down. We were getting in a rhythm of the new dynamics of our relationship.

During the first part of 2019, we were working on my dad’s place, attempting to get it completed. This was slow going as we were still tired from working on my house. Plus, we started having problems with the driveway trying to wash away. There was a spring that started popping up in the middle of the driveway, or I thought that. In July, we were working on the driveway, and during going and getting some supplies, my dad fell up in my basement. He came back too, but he didn’t feel right or look right. The following weeks was very tiring as I was worried about him. He had a stroke in August (the first part of the month).

Eric, my best friend, had been battling stage 4 cancer for about 20 months prior to my dad’s stroke. I had dinner with him shortly after my dad had his stroke, and he was worried about me. Last part of August, Eric passed away. I was able to go say good bye to him, and the following day, he had passed.

To help with the timeline:

Uncle Passed (Paul) in June
Dad had a stroke in August (first part)
Eric passed away in August (last part)
Aunt passed (Barbara) in September (first part)

The thing that affected me the most, was the fear of losing my dad.