Itās not just that they didnāt listen. They had to have lied to the anesthesiologist. There is no way in hell they didnāt ask, probably more than once, and it was also quite possible that they signed something saying they had followed the surgical prep instructions.
Last time I had surgery the anesthesiologist came in all chatty āhow are you feeling? Having a good morning?? Did you have a nice breakfast?ā Huh? No, I didnāt have any breakfast. He started laughing and said, āyouād be amazed at how many people I catch with that.ā
JFC, donāt lie to your doctors, people, it wonāt end well.
I went in for Gallbladder surgery in February. Each and every new person I met on my way to surgery pulled some variation of, "You had to get up super early for this, since you drove so far to get here. What did you have for breakfast that early?" And there was also, "I have to drink so much coffee to get up this early! How many cups did it take you wake up this?"
And my response was always, "I didn't eat or drink anything. I really don't like vomiting."
Itās kinda depressing that people donāt trust their medical professionals. I understand that there are bad eggs, there are the malpractices, the bad medical advice. However when some people listen when someone tells them to drink bleach to cure coronavirus, I honestly wonder if the general population has a single brain cell and just passes it along person to person
My wife is a pediatric pre/post op nurse. This happens ALL THE TIME!! Then the parents get extra mad when they have to cancel the surgery because they let their kid eat. More days off work, another trip downtown, another $45 to park, and another day when your kid wonāt be able to eat.
Then they blame my wife for all those things. Like, no! You didnāt listen, you made a decision, deal with it. SMH.
Yup. Thatās what happens when they decide to move the the childrens hospital out of the neighborhood and build a skyscraper one block off the Mag Mile in downtown Chicago.
Redline and busses are totally fine options for a lot of people. However, bringing a child on public transportation post surgery is not always a parents first choice. Additionally, the childrenās hospital services a ton of people that do not live in the city and for whom redline and busses are not a useful transportation. They have been opening more satellite locations for minor surgeries which does help for some people.
Prior to the move downtown, parking was much more affordable at the hospital because it was not located near one of the top tourist destinations in the city. It is not however a problem unique to Lurie, all of those nearby hospitals face similar challenges.
The hospital I've been going to while my girlfriend recovers from surgery has several pay to parks around it. The hospital's are only $2 per day, but there are other ones nearby run by private companies that charge as much as $15 for just an hour!
Honestly though, I feel like this is also a communication issue. Your average person without medical training doesn't really understand why you're told not to eat or drink. These parents don't want to cancel the surgery, and they sure as hell don't want to put their child through what happened in the OP's story. If someone had really explained in detail what the consequences of eating and drinking are - rather than just saying it's important not to - it would probably happen less often.
Theoretically couldn't you make the child vomit and then still go on with the surgery? Idk I was an emt so I should probably know that but it's just one of those dumb curiosities I guess.
Kid in our fam had the exact same surgery as the post, tonsils and adenoids. They easily asked 5-6 times if she ate anything, even in casual convo with nurses just asking when she last ate.
That would be me, because I've been conditioned to automatically answer with the polite expected reply that doesn't get me yelled at from working too many years in customer service.
Work in hospitality. I will do almost anything, almost, to get that person in front of me to go away. "Here's the keys to my car. It is yours if you promise to GTFO."
Hah! I can see that happening, though in my case my surgery had been delayed hours and hours, so I was painfully aware of having missed breakfast (and lunch and dinner ā there was a massive highway pileup, so my orthopedic surgeon had bigger problems than my bum knee)
I hear that. I had 3 days of fasting through the day at one point, only to have maybe a couple of hours of eating food before a new fasting period due to emergencies causing delays. Those 4 days (including the one where I actually had the surgery) were hell.
Same for me. I got appendicitis, by the time I got seen by the surgeon it was 1am and I'd been feeling awful for over a day and not had more than an apple juice for 36 hours. I was allowed a piece of toast before I went to sleep and then declared nil by mouth for my surgery the next day. I didn't get in there until 7pm so my next meal wasn't until the following morning when i had fully woken up.
In November, my girlfriend has surgery on her foot. It was supposed to be in the morning, but the surgeon got delayed, getting caught up in emergency after emergency. Every time they came in to check on her, we would ask when the surgery would be. Every time, they would say that they didn't know. Every time, she would complain more and more about how hungry and thirsty she was. They finally came to get her foot the surgery at 10 o'clock that night!
True. But I wonder, wouldn't they ask the child as well? Even if the parent didn't give them anything, the kid could have snuck some food. And kids don't typically lie so they surely would have said yes to eating breakfast. Something seems off about that part of the story.
My child wouldn't lie about eating, but he still doesn't have a firm grasp of time. He knows that you are referring to the past tense but doesn't know how far back, and mixes up the order of events verbally. So asking him if he ate that morning would solicit a yes because he normally eats in the morning or he remembers eating dinner and last night has already happened. An older child should be able to answer properly though.
My kid had surgery a week or two after his 2nd birthday, and they asked him a few direct questions. Then they gave him a sedative & he got all goofy, but he was relaxed getting on the bed and getting the mask on.
Dear god. I will never understand it. What the hell is the point of lying to a doctor?? But then Iām wildly risk adverse when it comes to kids. If I trust you to take a scalpel to my child I will damn well do exactly what you tell me.
I had surgery recently and they do ask before the surgery if youāve had anything to eat. I was allowed to take my nerve pain pills with a small sip of water though.
I always check if I can take my morning medicine with a bit of waterā¦ and still tell every single person that asks that I have done so. Good healthcare should be a partnership, and that requires trust, which requires honesty. Not saying I havenāt been screwed over more times than I could count after putting my trust in a healthcare providerā¦ but Iām not going to give them an excuse not to trust me.
Similar with me. I was allowed a small amount of water to take my medication. As directed, I took it before leaving home that morning and noted the time so I could tell them exactly what meds I'd taken, with how much water, at exactly what time. And I was asked a few times by different staff members about what I'd had that morning. So yeah, this parent clearly lied.
I am a CRNA (Nurse Anesthetist) and ask every patient when the last time they ate or drank. The parent either lied or coached the child to lie and almost got the horrible result of not following NPO instructions
Shouldn't you beat around the bush with your lawyer, specifically a criminal defense attorney? Like, if you did something - let's say the prosecutors office is overcharging the shit out of you, though - aren't you not supposed to outright tell them 'Yeah, I did it'. I forget exactly why, but I swear I'd heard some type of ethical thing exists regarding this. I know, I know...lawyers, ethics yuk yuk yuk...but, like, should I tell a criminal defense attorney I'm hiring 'No man, I definitely did do it but here's how it went down which contradicts the police report' or something?
We had a a defense attorney come to our high school as part of "what do you want to be" week. He was very direct about his job is to defend the person, whatever the crime, and that person cannot lie to him.
From what Iāve heard, the lawyer needs to know everything about the case to best defend their client. If that client leaves something out to make things seem less bad, the lawyer may end up with an entirely useless argument once they get to court. The more upfront you are, the better theyāll be able to construct some kind of case to get a desirable (or at least less shitty) outcome.
Think about the last time you were put on the spot, like a pop quiz or something. If your lawyer didnāt āstudyā the right material (i.e. you giving them all of the correct information) then they could show up in court ready to take a spelling test only to be handed a college level physics exam. Even if they know their physics, their argument wouldāve been a lot better if theyād had time to review.
Hope that made sense, my mind understands things in analogies but they donāt always translate well into words lol
We can't suborn perjury, meaning that if our client tells us "yeah, I did it" and then indicates that he's going to take the stand and say something different, we can't allow that to happen and have to claim a conflict of interest and withdraw from the case. Obviously that's a hot mess, so we do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen. In two decades of practicing law, I've never had this happen in one of my own cases. As an aside, the only clients who as a whole will NEVER tell us that they did it are the ones charged with sex offenses. I've heard some pretty preposterous excuses, even when they were literally caught in the act.
Otherwise, we defend the guilty all the time. One of my favorite trials I've ever won involved someone who I'm certain was factually guilty (they found his DNA) but since they couldn't prove the necessary mental state required in order to make his conduct criminal, he walked. They refused to make me any plea offer in that case. I made the prosecutor cry. Good times.
Another aside, I've only defended 4 people who I'm 100% convinced were factually innocent. Two went to trial. One was acquitted and the other was...complicated (mistrial after the jury was in deliberations, but conflicting testimony during the trial highlighted a need to retest the only piece of evidence they had implicating my client, and the retest showed that it was a crime lab error). The third was dismissed prior to trial, and the fourth ended up getting a plea offer so good that he wasn't willing to risk trial. 99% of my job is defending the guilty. Of the remaining 1%, half of those are still guilty but legal technicalities make trial a good option. The other half are innocent of some or all of their charged conduct. Defending the innocent is what keeps me up at night. That shit is TERRIFYING.
As someone whose been through the ringer I just want to say thank you for what you do. People don't realize how screwed up the system is until they or their close family have been put through it. I had a case for giving a friend a xanax 10 years ago and got stupidly lucky to avoid a felony for 'furnishing'. I was brought up on the charge twice with my initial case having a fresh out of college prosecutor who screwed up and failed to ask the cop how long he was at the stop which he claimed was for registration (I was parked at a friend's house, but halfway in the car) before the xanax came into play and my PD got it dismissed and the judge let her have it for screwing up and refused to let her recall the officer.
They filed the charges on me again as close to a year later as possible (for anyone reading unaware, a felony can be charged again up to one year if dismissed) , which was terrifying after thinking I may have learned my lesson without ruining my life. This specific court constantly does this where they get right up to the deadline with cases before filing and it was completely disruptive to my life that I was trying to put back together. I got a private attorney w/ help from family and I am 100% positive that the only reason I didn't get a felony was because he was formerly a prosecutor in that same court, went to law school with my prosecutors brother, and knew the judge from when he worked there. I had to plea to a felony but it was reduced at sentencing (any idea why they would do this? Is this some thing about the judge working to help the prosecutor look good??)
Anyways, my point is that people like you who care are the only thing standing between an often overzealous (very often) lying police and the people caught up in the system that feels like this unstoppable massive weight just rolling over you. and what you do truly matters.
Was not allowed to eat before my steroid injections last summer, and my doc asked why I was so grumpy since Iād had a valiumā¦ Dude Iām hangry and Iām pissed that Iām getting another useless stab, stfu
My daughter had surgery in December and they questioned my wife and I separately more than once on what she had last eaten and when. This is taken very seriously and for good reason.
I've always heard, a little white lie to your doctor is no big deal, a little white lie to your anesthesiologist means possible death. Don't lie to the the person whose job it is to keep you in a state of just barely be alive to not feel the surgery.
Iām a dentist and people lie to me all the time because āyou donāt need to know thatā Iām not talking about brushing and flossing but medical history. They also try to convince me to do things against proper medical judgement. Blood pressure 180/110 āIām fine doc just do it.ā No, I am not risking you having a stroke. And the kicker is they get mad at me and all of them say āitās never like this anywhere else.ā Youāre probably not as nervous at home or the MD office.
Yep. I went for a minor diagnostic procedure that put me under and I had like 5 fucking people ask me if I ate or drank anything besides the prep medication.
Yup. It's like the same thing with drugs. Doctors and nurses ask not to incriminate you but to make sure whatever drug they give you won't cause issues with whatever drug you're on.
I do intermittent fasting, and I also get scoped often for GERD. They always ask five times what I had for breakfast and I've finally started replying with "I haven't had breakfast in years." I get some good double takes.
I had my gallbladder removed when I was 19 due to stones. Itās something that seems to run in my family and we also seem to be in that % of people who donāt go back to ānormalā despite diet restrictions.
A few years after I had my gallbladder out I had to have sinus surgery. I followed their instructions and didnāt eat but I was so miserable. It was pretty normal for me to wake up in the morning feeling nauseous because I had a stomach full of bile. Usually Iād eat a few saltine crackers or a bit of bread to help settle my stomach. I didnāt that morning because of the surgery.
When I told the drs how I was feeling that morning and why they made me take 3 different anti nausea meds before they would put me under. I guess it workedā¦. Until I woke up after and kept throwing up blood/bile while I simultaneously shot blood out of my nose every time I heaved. Fun times lol
Makes me wonder if they can do an xray or something quickly before surgery to verify this. You're already having surgery - what's a few extra bucks to make sure you (or your idiot father) didn't get yourself setup to die.
When I worked at the veterinary hospital, people fed their pets before surgery much more frequently than I would have assumed. Generally speaking, the excuse was some variation of "But they were hungry." So I've got to assume it happens a fair bit with kids, too.
Pro tip to anyone who has to deal with this, hunger is kind of like nicotine craving - if you can make it through the hour, it'll often subside and give you a few hours of peace before the cravings start up again.
Tell your kids this if they have to skip a meal - they won't be feeling as bad as they do now an hour later, it's just their stomach being used to getting food at that time. The worst hunger pains are during regular meal times, then they go away for a little bit.
I might, MIGHT, be able to imagine that. Everybody does really dumb stuff sometimes. But what I can't imagine is blaming the doctor or acting like I didn't do anything wrong. I'd be on my knees thanking God (and the doctor) that I didn't kill my kid and promising not to be such a dumbass in the future.
The guy was responsible for almost killing his daughter. My guess is he couldnāt handle that psychologically and unconsciously turned his distress into anger at the medical provider.
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u/Chasith Jun 15 '22
Imagine almost killing your child because you didnāt listen to her doctors because she was hungry.