Expecting the Worst and Receiving a Miracle
Posted: Sunday, June 19, 2011
by Patricia Johnson
Articles and Answers.com
The call came around 8:30 pm. My husband was visiting friends in Indiana and had been taken to the local hospital because he was not feeling well. The emergency room doctor looked at my husband’s vitals and told him he could leave that there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with him, at which time my husband demanded a blood test.
The problem was transportation. It would require one ambulance to take him to the state line and another ambulance to pick him up at the other end. We had a prior experience with transporting from one state to another and decided it was too risky; therefore I told Mike I would come, pick him up and bring him to our local hospital. Our friends would drive him to a ½ way point in an effort to save valuable time.
I called our neighbor, told him I’d pick him up in two minutes, got dressed and ran to the car. On the way out of town we stopped at a local convenience store and I filled a bag with bottled water – I’m not sure why, but for some reason it seemed to be the thing to do at the time. In retrospect it couldn’t have been anything other than a nudge in the right direction from the guy upstairs.
It’s very possible I broke every existing speed limit while driving, but we made it there and picked up my husband at the appointed location. With assistance from the local police we were able to pinpoint his exact location and the transfer was made as quickly as humanely possible.
My husband looked terrible, he was incredibly pale and the slightest turn made him dizzy and nauseous, but I kept after him to drink more and more water, which he did.
When we arrived at our destination they took one look at the lab reports we brought with us and immediately put Mike in intensive care and called in two doctors; a critical care specialist and a Nephrologist.
Both doctors told me they didn’t expect my husband to live through the night, but the more I explained his medical history to them, the more they began to suspect his kidney failure was due to a drug overdose. They had previously observed the same type of symptoms in drug addicts. I assured them my husband didn’t take ‘street drugs’, but did take an unusual number of prescription drugs so they asked me if it was okay for them to ‘experiment’ with my husband.
Since he wasn’t expected to live through the night, any sort of hope the doctors could offer was welcomed and I gave them the okay to proceed. The plan was to put my husband on IV’s and flush whatever drugs were in his system out, a much faster method than drinking excessive amounts of water.
All night long the IV’s kept coming and by the next morning my husband was still alive and his Creatinine level had dropped slightly. The flush was continued for the next several days and nights while he was kept in intensive care and by the end of a week he was able to be moved out of the intensive care unit.
When he was finally able to leave the hospital he was given one pill to take, not one prescription, but one pill to take until the next visit with his doctor. For several months after his release he was required to see the doctor on a weekly basis to have his blood drawn and six months later his Creatinine level had finally returned to a relatively normal number.
It was determined this life-threatening incident was caused by the cholesterol drug, Lopid.
The experience on its own would normally be frightening, but in this case it was even more traumatic to me because of the fact my mother had died from kidney failure, at the same hospital, seven years earlier. My husband was even placed in the same intensive care room my mother had prior to her death.
My husband’s life was saved by people like you, individuals that have adverse reactions to drugs and report the adverse reactions.
“MedWatch is the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) program for reporting serious reactions, product quality problems, therapeutic inequivalence/failure, and product use errors with human medical products, such as drugs and medical devices.”
Instructions on reporting adverse reactions may be found at the following link:
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/HowToReport/ucm053074.htm
© 2011 Patricia L Johnson
This Article has been viewed 908 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Pat, This is about the scariest story! You just should never take one version of a diagnosis and here it goes again. It is a good thing your husband himself was proactive and insisted on the blood test. Transferring him was yet another super fortunate move. Thank goodness everyone was proactive and thank goodness it ended well. Another important lesson! Thank you for sharing.OGM,
Believe me, it was scariest experience of my life!
I don't think there's anything more frustrating than going into an emergency room of a hospital and trying to tell the physician on duty there's something wrong with you and they don't buy it. This was a small, rural hospital - but still, they should have drawn blood on their own, without the patient demanding.
My husband doesn't normally complain about how he feels and when he says "there's something seriously wrong with me"; there's definitely something that needs attention.
Thank you for your comment.
Pat JohnsonFor the most part, emergency personnel try to do the right thing by their patients. I have experienced half-hazard diagnoses in an emergency room when my daughter was a patient. She had a pulmonari embolis and continued to have numerous associated problems including the warfarin medication. Not to go into elaborate detail, the pulmonari specialist's staff had overdosed the cumadin and my daughter took a violent reaction = thank goodness I was there. I fought and fortunately I was not easily intimidated. I think my insistence saved her life that night. This was later admitted by both the hospital and the specialist!OGM,
I think you're absolutely correct most ER personnel try to do the right thing for the patients. Unfortunately, the ultimate decision on what action is taken lies with the Doctor on Duty and they don't always make the best decisions. I'm sure lack of sleep has something to do with it - ER doctors (at least in our area) work way too many hours in a row.
So sorry to hear about your daughter's experience. I hope and pray that she fully recuperated from her illness and associated side-effects.
P.
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.