OVER-THE-TOP
He was not rude or combative nor a threat. He was trying to answer the rapid fire questions that his interrogator kept changing up on him. Who does that to a cardiac patient coming out of ICU into a step-down unit, because they needed beds? What? A step-down into hell, recruit? Recruit? He’s a recruit? What did Toby Cosgrove institute while he was CEO as acceptable torture tactics to punish patients in electrolyte crisis? He needed salt. SALT. What were they trying to get him to confess to?
OVER-THE-TOP. He was over-medicated with diuretics and who knows what else that were starving his brain of fluid. How D-U-M-B can trained professionals be? No salt on any floor? Only sugar? I could give him sugar the nurse practitioner said to me over the phone the next morning.
The neurologist is here… He’s going to do a CAT scan of his brain to see if he had a stroke.
He needs salt, I said repeatedly. Is there water in the room? Yes. A faucet? Yes. Give him a large glass of tap water, no ice and tell him to drink the whole glass. He needs fluid if you can’t give him salt – lots of it. She said the doctors are all coming in. I gott , I gotta go. I knew then she wasn’t going to relay our conversation to the doctors and he wasn’t going to get any salt; she was intimidated by the doctors.
I explained to her earlier that this happens with Steve. He’s prescribed too many diuretics – he gets confused and speaks very slow and exaggerated and walks drunk. I carry a salt bottle in my purse. I give him salt from my palm and then a glass of water. It stops within a couple minutes. It works fast.
She wanted to know if he was talking different now than he did this morning – I went to answer and she interrupted – I don’t mean from last night – stutter stammer – from this morning and now do you see a difference? I said yes. Now he sounds like last night. He sounded good this morning. She kept asking me to repeat myself, as if I was lying, and I kept telling her to give him salt and she was laughing saying you know what? that’s what I was thinking, he had too many diuretics – we don’t have any salt here. No where in the hospital? pause pause, well, maybe in the cafeteria, but I never saw any. She hung up. She hatta go.
Steve had been trying to call me all morning, he said he couldn’t call out from his cell phone or the room phone, he told me this when I called him, so then I knew to call him periodically. When I got to the hospital I tried the room phone and Steve was right, when I called my iphone number I got some cancer unit at the hospital, so somebody tripped up the phones so he couldn’t make a call outside the hospital while they were torturing him.
There is no other explanation. They kept insisting that there was nothing wrong with the room phone; I heard his interrogator the night before tell him that over and over again. I also tried the 911 button and that connected me to the police – looking back I don’t know if that was the campus police or the Cleveland Police – the person answering seemed a little too casual, like I interrupted another conversation with an employee. I’ve called 911 before and never did they sound jovial.
I have a note right in front of me: CCF – The next day he was not able to call me from his cell phone or the room phone. After arriving at his room I tried using the room phone and it wouldn’t work, whether I added or didn’t add 1+ area code plus the number. So he was right .
They did the same thing the night before when they were abusing him with harsh interrogation techniques. When I used his phone to call my phone, I got instead some cancer unit in the clinic.
So for all this time he was held captive with no ability to call outside the hospital for help.
I immediately prepared to go to the hospital. As fast as I could – with the salt he needed. When I got there he was still confused, so the nurse practitioner didn’t get him any salt. He had a water pitcher on the bed table, so I gave him the salt from my purse, a good amount, and told him to drink the entire glass of water, which he did. He was extremely stressed saying they won’t let me go home – all I want is to go home – they’re trying to keep me here. Some doctor came in and rapid fired questions at me again. He said I passed. I thought why does he have to pass a competency test to go home? He had some problem writing down numbers, dates, he’d say a number but write a different number. I finally wrote them down and he memorized them, he said don’t say anything, I’ll handle all this. His fog was beginning to lift.
The nurse practitioner kept rubbing his thigh, I thought what is this about, who does that, starts rubbing a patient’s thigh? If he fails the test, he has to stay another night and you know who will come back and finish the job? We rehearsed his answers before she came in, next thing you know we’re in an Uber on our way home. If he had failed, I was prepared to take him home regardless.
Forty-two minutes and nobody made an effort to stop this monster interrogator from abusing my husband, a cooperative patient who simply didn’t feel he would survive an open-heart. He was abused by his cardiologist, who by the way tried to send a prescription of 1 gram of valium to his pharmacy pre-surgery, repeatedly, and it kept being denied. His assistant, also stood by and did nothing. I was there and a witness to it. So Steve had to go to his primary care for a prescription that his cardiologist ordered.
Five milligrams, ten milligrams, but 1000 milligrams? Of course the CCF didn’t approve it. I was shocked that his assistant just stood there. The doctor kept saying, it won’t go through, it wouldn’t go through. When he walked in the first thing he said was I’m having a bad day, a really bad day, when my husband said, this is my wife – he ignored him and my presence there. We were told by all the brochures on line that basically it takes a team to treat a patient at the CCF and family is part of that team. I have yet to see any evidence in support of that theme…
to be continued…
HAPPY WHITE HORSE™ 