We Need the Bed - Get Lost !

I've been sitting on this one for a week, but I just can't do it anymore. I have to let off a little steam about St. Michael's Hospital in downtown Toronto. I was there all day last Thursday, Feb. 26, and then again on the morning of Friday Feb. 27. The reason for my being there was the fact that the visually impaired student with whom I work was there to have an eye eviscerated. This meant the removal of the eye's contents to reduce the pain he had been so often experiencing.
When we saw the doctor who would be doing the surgery, just before the procedure was done, he startled me by telling his patient that he could expect to be discharged the next morning. At that point, I thought it seemed really too fast a pace to move at, but I also thought, "they must know what they're doing."
After the young man had been brought to a room following his hour in recovery, I sat by his bedside, ready to greet him when he came to, as I had promised I would. He began after a time to moan, and when the frequency of the moans kept increasing, I contacted the nurses' station to let them know what was happening. A young nurse came bustling into the room in short order, with two Tylenol 3 tablets in a little paper cup. She handed them to me and instructed me to administer them. A little taken aback, I asked if they might present any choking hazard since he was lying down. She said a short and simple no and bustled away. OK. So I lost a whole lot of my confidence in them at that point, but I made sure he got the pills down and left shortly after, when his sister arrived from work.
The next morning, my daughter and I arrived at 11:00 intending to visit. We found him instead, in the midst of being shown the door. The doctor had apparently come in earlier and left orders for his discharge. The way in which the doc's instructions were carried out swept away any vestige of respect I might have had left for St. Michael's Hospital, any feeling that they cared about what they were doing.
The man was told the bed was needed and that if no-one was able to come to take him home, he was welcome to sit in the lounge at the end of the hall until someone did arrive.
Let me offer a few details here, just to make sure you understand the whole situation. First of all, someone might, I suppose, question why this individual would not simply call a cab, if there was no family member available to give him a ride. The answer is limited funds. A disability pension is not enough to fund the luxury of cab rides. Second, this individual is blind. Take him down the hall to the lounge and leave him there, and you might as well be abandoning him in a foreign country. He would have just as much chance at finding his way around, finding the bathroom, for instance, or a place to get a drink during the long hours of waiting.
The nurse who began the pre-discharge interview with him treated it like nothing more than a formality which had no meaning to her, other than to cover her ass, "in case".
The man was still flat on his back in the hospital bed when she began. She asked him questions like, "Can you go to the bathroom by yourself?" and, "Can you walk without feeling dizzy?" She did not at any time make it clear to him that she meant to ask him if he was able to do these things as part of him caring for himself, AFTER the operation. I know, because I stood there through the whole thing. After a few of these questions, I asked him if he had even been up and walking around yet. He said he had not. None deterred, she continued with the questions as if I and my concerns were no more than fly specks on the wall. She asked him if he could wash himself. He replied he could, not understanding that she meant to ascertain whether or not any postoperative queasiness or dizziness was interfering. The questions were all ridiculous, every single one of them, because she never did offer any explanation to him, nor did she acknowledge the fact that because he had not yet done any of those things for himself since the surgery, she was really getting non-answers, inaccurate responses that she was clearly pushing for, the only ones she wanted to hear.
When she was finished her farce of an interview, she walked out into the hall, where another nurse challenged her on his discharge, within our hearing. The first thing out of her mouth was, "That's the way the cookie crumbles." She also repeated to the second nurse that she kept getting calls for beds.
At this point, my daughter and I found ourselves left alone with the young man again. He clearly needed assistance with dressing and we were obviously expected to take up the slack for him. I went out into the hall and cornered a nurse standing out there. She had been in and out of the room while the aforementioned farce was playing out. I told her he needed help and she asked why I couldn't do it. I told her I worked with him at the college. I am not family. I told her I thought a nurse doing the job would leave him with a little more feeling of dignity than having his reader/scribe do it. The look on her face made it clear that she was pissed with having to help.
Once he was back in his street clothes, my daughter and I took the young man downstairs to the in-hospital Tim Horton's where we bought him the sweetened coffee he requested, the only thing he said he could stomach at that point. WE waited with him until his sister arrived - I had phoned her and asked her to come. Once we had seen him safely into her car, we walked away, both of us shaking our heads in disbelief at the totally uncaring pre-discharge farce we had just witnessed. We walked away, both of us disgusted with the unfeeling nurse who had make it clear to him that he was nothing more than a delay in her quest for an empty bed for the next patient.
I know very well that she is only one of the many on staff there, but she is the one who dealt with us that morning. She is the one who left the three of us with a jaundiced view of the "angels of mercy" of St. Michael's Hospital. She is the one who represented that institution for us at that point, the one who made sure it is not a hospital to which any of us would give good word-of-mouth.