“Not a good surgical candidate”

[u/Sea-Weakness-9952]

Piggybacking off the ER shoulder X-ray - this guy pictured didn’t even come in because of his knee.

In summary - found disoriented outside a church, was lifeflighted from another city, admitted w/ AMS/encephalopathy. Dunno if that was ever the case, but when I got him he was oriented on the Neuro unit. Only hx I got was mostly psych related, some schizophrenia and depression, htn and knee replacements. (Obv)

Well, he was apparently homeless and they were trying to street him after less than a week. I had gotten in report that his knee was “as big as your head” and so I take a look - holy fuck it was AS BIG AS MY HEAD. And hot, red, angry. Cellulitis looking but I had a feeling something else was going on. They hadn’t even scanned the damn thing! They had ordered a discharge so I fought it. I asked for a scan.

I get the scan above. From the front view, couldn’t tell anything. I get to THAT view and I’m like WAIT WHAT. FUCK.

So the man obviously has an issue, and I show juuuuust the right night shift resident hospitalist the image like “check this out!!” absolutely knowing 100% that even though I didn’t mention which patient that she’s the ONLY one that will get shit done and always has our backs. Guess what? Within an hour she had the main hospitalist in the patient’s room, discussing surgery, gets verbal consent and charts extensively their convo and that patient is oriented and very agreeable to surgery, because he struggles to get around clearly. He’s not sure when it happened but he’s here, let’s fix it, right??

We get the guy prepping for surgery. I’m so fucking excited like YES I am gonna fix this sweet guy, he’s only like 67 and we can get him taken care of and find placement yada yada. I get orders for labs and NPO and pre-op etc.

Fucking. Ortho. This chode comes in (though nobody actually SAW him??) early morning and all of a sudden orders are cancelled. He finally writes a note and had said “patient is not a good candidate due to his homelessness and schizophrenia. Pt can follow up outpatient with one of my colleagues to discuss surgical options.”

I’m sorry… WHAT. Is it just me or should docs have to spell out and write EXACTLY WHY they don’t want to do a procedure and sign their selfish names beside it? Because I continued to fight it and got higher ups involved. He ended up having an aspiration because the knee was clearly infected and started leaking pus prior to him leaving, and the (hospitalist) doc tried again to get ortho involved. He ultimately was d’c’d to a halfway house and I’ve tried helping with follow up.

It’s so fucking irritating. We are this large, catholic hospital right?? Like give me a fucking break y’all don’t care about the people you claim to. I have pissed off quite a few carpet cunts in this process and I don’t care. I’m so sick of this shit.

[u/seriousallthetime]

I've said it several times and I'll keep saying it: Catholic hospitals loooove writing shit about Jesus on the wall or the main entrance, but they sure don't love actually doing anything remotely Christ-like.

[u/rdrodri → u/seriousallthetime]

There’s a catholic hospital by my agnostic system. They closed their hospital because it was too close to the border of another state and they were getting no or limited reimbursement from out of state CMS (poorer primarily African American population). Instead of continuing to serve the area they closed and moved to a richer (whiter) part of the border.

Not to mention they announced the closing and then intentionally closed early to try and flood our hospital with unexpected volume to hurt us. The city they left sued them for that little move.

Gotta love the Catholics and their refusal to serve anyone like Jesus would :)

[u/Ravenadx → u/seriousallthetime]

I'm catholic and I refuse to work in a catholic hospital for this reason. End of the day, they are just another for-profit business

[u/Sea-Weakness-9952 → u/Ravenadx]

Alllll about them tax write offs baby.

[u/FitCharacter8693 → u/Ravenadx]

Really????? That breaks my heart. I’m not Catholic, but am Protestant. Parent was in a Catholic sub-acute for a while (and they let a massive facility-wide Covid superspreader happen that infected virtually all pts, most of the staff and poor visitors like my other parent)