A few weeks ago she had surgery that didn't go so well. It's been finally determined that there's nothing medically that we can do to save her life. She'll die of multi-system organ failure. Soon. She's supposed to go home this week to hospice. In the meantime, they don't want her back on a ventilator so she's visibly struggling to breathe and in obvious distress. I had her two nights in a row last week and spent a large amount of my time with her FURIOUS at the way her case is being handled. Her pain meds have been discontinued, even though she has an infected g-tube and a huge angry abdominal wound. For some idiotic reason most docs and NNPs believe that infants don't feel pain because they can't remember it later. We use a scoring system to help us determine whether a baby is in pain or not but even when we use it as nurses, it is largely ignored by the docs. Do they all take the same class on how NOT to give pain meds? I don't understand! This poor baby girl was miserable all night and I just about lost it on my nurse practitioner. I knew exactly how to help her but my hands were tied by the Big Cheese. If I don't have an order for pain meds I can't give them. I thought the whole purpose of hospice was to make a patient comfortable as they pass. Because this patient's family is self-pay I have this horrible idea that the docs don't care about her anymore - they just want her out of there. Mom had expressed the same idea to another nurse a few weeks back as well. I drove home from my last shift and bawled the entire way home.
I understand our health system is complicated but as a nurse it's a simple as this: I watched an adorable, sweet baby girl, who still managed to smile at me when I turned her music on for her, suffer needlessly the other night because of overinflated ego and greed. It completely sickened me and for a moment made me consider going back to the mortgage world where it was just paper and dollar bills.
