Hello and Good Day to all!

Have I told you that I am a consumer of dark chocolate. Not just DARK chocolate, but HEALTHY dark chocolate!

Yes, it is true, I eat Xocai Dark Healthy chocolate!  And it is yummy! It also is very good for you.

Have you tried it? Would you like to? I can be persuaded to send you a sample if you ask really nicely! 

There is tons of info on my website www.xocai-healthydarkchocolate.com   check it out. You will read some great testimonies, one of them is mine.  Long story short is that I had BAD…did I say BAD…YES…BAD acid reflux for about 4-5 years, so bad that the Doc felt it was starting to scar my esophagus, well after consuming my lovely chocolate for a week it disappeared! I get the occasional flare up but I do not take my meds the way I used to! WHOOHOO!  Anyway, go to my site and check it out. Click on the links…do some reading or watching, see for yourself!

Happy eating!

The MAN in question is Dr. John Sparzo the VP of Medical Affairs at Hendricks Regional Hospital. I just wanted to write the finale update on our terrible hospital experience.

On Aug 29th this Dr. wrote me a letter and sent it registered, basically telling me the trail was cold and nothing he could do nor cared to admit to in the way of lack of care for my daughter.

He cared enough to send the letter registered, OH wait, that was probably not for MY benefit as much as for HIS and the hospitals, right? I am SO naive!

Okay, so I received the letter which, as I said, really said nothing but he did end it with the very KIND suggestion that IF I was not happy with his letter I could go jump in a lake…no, kidding! I could call the Health Department and he gave me their address! Was that so kind of him? Yes, I’m sure.

I gave him a call or 2 regarding the letter and had to leave voice mails, I indicated to him that I would love to talk to him and that he could call me back but he never did. 

Oh and by the way, the way it went was, I wrote a letter, he called and left a voice mail on my phone numbers ( 2 numbers) and I called him back within a few minutes after the second voice mail, I had to leave him a voice mail. I called again and left him a voice mail telling him it appeared we were playing phone tag but I would keep trying if he returned my call and I missed it again. Ummmm he never called me back AND he says in his nice registered letter that he left me 2 voice mails but does not mention the fact that I returned his calls both times and he dropped the ball.

 After I wrote this letter my daughter had a procedure at his hospital that we subsequently canceled, ( we could not go through with it at that hospital) and in his latter he makes reference to it because he visited the surgery area to meet me.

Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention, he did say “thank you” to me! No, nothing to do with my daughters lack of care and how he was happy that I am not a sue happy person and just wanted them to know what happened…..No, he thanked me because HIS Ambassador at the hospital which took down our complaints apparently did not do her job and deliver the survey to the department head or anything…she just logged it on the computer and forgot about it. Thank you he says for allowing us to see the “gap” in  our service recovery efforts.  Well as you all know I am all about service recovery!!

 You are welcome Mr. Sparzo

This is a letter that I wrote to the VP of Medical Affairs at HRH and copied it to a few others. (It is in regards to the post entitled Hendricks Regional Hospital and Paula Stephens-midwife)

Enclosed please find a posting that I wrote about my daughters hospital stay at your facility. Rather than rewrite it I decided to send it to you as is. You will get the full feeling behind her stay and what it was like for our family. (I am surprised we have not heard from anyone, we told a Ambassador before we left how bad the care given to my daughter was, she was taking a survey, so your hospital has the info)

My intention is to let you know how horrible the experience was for us and, hopefully, make sure it does not occur again. Unfortunately, my daughter has to be at your facility again on Aug 22nd for another procedure. I pray that this experience goes much better than the last.

As I stated in the posting, I would rather not have to entrust my daughters care to your facility again. I realize that living where we do we might not have much choice. At this point if it is within my power we will all go to Clarion West. My daughter had a procedure there after her stay at your facility and it was like night and day the way she was treated at Clarion West. I felt very good about leaving her in the hands of the Dr’s and nurses at Clarion; I cannot say the same about HRH.

I actually felt I needed to cancel a trip we had planned, so that I could be with my daughter for this upcoming procedure when I found out it would be at HRH. It is a pretty simple procedure and there should be no problems, unfortunately, we have little faith in your facility. I pray all goes well.

I hope that you read the enclosed and take it for how it was intended, a plea for better care when we put our lives in your facilities hands, not just for my family, but for all of the families in our community. Some very basic things were mishandled during her stay. I am sure some of it is probably just a family not knowing what is happening and a lack of communication on the part of the mid-wife, some of it though, indicates a very definite problem.

I do hope to hear back from you.

***UPDATE***As of today, Aug 22nd, I have received a call from the VP of Medical Affairs at HRH. We are in teh midst of a game of phone tag , but I hope to talk to him soon. His message was very pleasant and his exact words were that he wished to “chat” about my letter. I will keep you posted!

OKAY- I KNOW this is a lonnnnnngggggggggg one! If you take the time to read it I think you will agree that it needed to be long. And I didnt say everything I wanted to, but I will to the VP of Medical Affairs, no worries.

I would like to say to all of you RN’s and MD’s and anyone else in the medical field that respect their position and their patients- this is not about you,I hope you can respect the fact that this happened to our family and we felt it needed to be said. We are not trying to attack anyone and are seriously trying to be accurate in our memories. This was a family wrote letter.

On a personal note- I would like to say that I have no idea why we ever put up with the things we put up with. And especially ME being ME!!! When we get into scary positions we never know how we will react. That is all I can say. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I pray I have learned and will never let something like this happen again. I read this article now and I am in complete WONDER as to how I ever let my daughter lie in that bed and just be in so much pain and with such a high fever and never see a DOCTOR! ALL the while 37 weeks pregnant with a Nephrostomy tube in her back, high fever and a headache that will not resolve. When you read what happened, remember 37 weeks pregnant,Nephrostomy tube,fever and headache……..just laying in that bed day after day, no doctor ever visits. YES, I’m emotional about it!

The following is my families account of what happened when my daughter was admitted to Hendricks Regional Hospital on a Sunday in the middle of the night the week of June 13th,2008. She was 37 weeks pregnant and very ill.

Rather than sit here and write an entire novel of the 7 day ordeal, I am going to give you the high points.

We will start with what they did RIGHT~
*Allowed the 3 of us to stay with my daughter as much as we wanted/needed.
*In the end, we left the hospital with a somewhat healthy daughter and grandson. Thank GOD.

What they did WRONG~ before writing this down I want to make it perfectly clear that I am in no way exaggerating the events I am documenting. *** Let me remind you, she is 37 weeks pregnant! There is a baby in utero during all of this! ***

* NO DR. EVER CAME TO SEE MY DAUGHTER. ONLY her midwife. You would think an infectious disease Dr. would have made a visit? ( you should understand this comment after you read what happened)

*When inserting her first IV they put the tourniquet on and left it there for approx.15 minutes while her arm turned blue. Why my son in law did not say anything or my daughter or her sister in law???? I do not know, I was not there yet. I got this from each one of them though, 15 minutes, approx!

*Found a used needle in her bed

*left her for hours without taking a blood pressure or temp (on a patient with high fever)

* Never brought her food. If we had not ordered and made her eat she would have sat there and not ate at all. * of course we can not say what would have happened had we not been there, we were too scared to leave and find out. Maybe, if she were alone they would have fed her? We will never know.

*Nurse said that she was going to get Flowtrons (SP?) to put on her, this helps to prevent blood clots, the nurse never brought them, we had to ask for them again.

* Nurse was asked for pain meds, but did not bring them.

*

It is important at this point to mention that my daughter was running a fever, sometimes only around 102 but other times it would soar to over 104. And it stayed that way for 4 days. It broke a few times but then came back. I have since learned that maybe hospitals do not take fevers too seriously?? I do not know, maybe we should have had some communication?

Nurse took temp, it was 102.3. She gave Tylenol; within 20 minutes I called the nurse back in because my daughters temp felt elevated, beyond the original 102.3. I asked her to take her temp and the nurse said we needed to wait another 20 minutes before we could check it. The Tylenol needed to work! The last time I checked a patient could seize or worse if their temp got too high! Why would you EVER leave a patient unattended with a high temp? I asked the nurse to talk to my daughter because she was extremely lethargic, she still left the room.

* IV nurse was called to change the IV, it took 3 calls and a couple of hours to get her in the room, when she finally walked in she promptly left to start another patients IV and never came back. We had to call them again.

* They disconnected her call button on the bed. They did ask us if we would be there, but they never reconnected it, until we asked. The disconnection was due to construction in the hospital.

* The midwife came in and told us that my daughter may have e-coli. She expressed to my daughter that whichever bacteria she ended up with it could kill her, this was in response to a question posed by my daughter as to how dangerous this was. These were the midwife’s words not mine. The midwife also said that they would have the test results later that day or the next day, we would have to wait until then to find out what it was.

I explained to the midwife, as well as the nurse, that my daughter’s family had experienced a recent tragedy in which a young cousin had passed away from Meningitis. I asked her if it could be Meningitis, she said probably not because she didn’t have a headache that could not be gotten rid of with medicine. OK. Then my daughter’s headache gets worse and will not go away, PERIOD.

They give her med after med and it will not touch the headache. My daughter says on a scale from 1-10 her headache is a 7 or 8. Needless to say the family gets worried. Because now her headache will not go away! We keep calling the nurse about this headache and fever but nothing they do will get rid of it. As I said I explained to them that we are sensitive because of a recent tragedy. Everyone is being a little sensitive and rightly so. Then the midwife comes in and says they are going to give my daughter drugs to put her to sleep for the night. They feel if she just sleeps the headache will go away. I ask what happens if it doesn’t and they say at that point they will do more tests.

OK. My son in law is worried because this is what happened with his cousin, they put her to sleep medically and she never woke up. I explain AGAIN to the nurse that the family is upset and to be sensitive to them. She says they will put a finger monitor on her to keep an eye on her oxygen levels and pulse rate. It was a long night. Her blood pressure dropped to around 77/38, everyone was scared and the hospital was not concerned. They turned the monitors down so the noise wouldn’t bother anyone! The noise was saying that the BP was too low. We asked at what point they would get concerned, they said that if her BP was low AND her color was off, THEN they would worry, otherwise nothing to worry about.

Next day the headache was still present, sleep did not get rid of it. And we still have not gotten the results from the tests. And may I point out that NO DOCTOR has visited my daughter since she was admitted!!?? Finally I get the nurse and ask about the results and she still has the headache, this family is very upset! Can we please get the results?? The midwife comes in a few minutes later, gives us the results, no e-coli or meningitis, some other somewhat rare bacteria that she doesn’t know much about and apparently doesn’t know how my daughter got it or what it can do to her. When my daughter asks what is it the midwife says “Well, what is a bacteria?” and goes on to say it is just a bacteria. What does that mean? I do not know. And she shares nothing with us.

Then the midwife went on to say, to my daughter, that her family was giving her the headache, we were all staring at her. We were making her nervous. Too much stress, she actually said we were looking for a “magic bullet” to make my daughter healthy quickly!!!! ANd YES, she actually said it was making her stressed that we were all staring at her.

After she left I asked my son in law if he felt that we had just been chastised for being in the way and causing my daughter to be sicker then she should have been. Yes, he felt the same way. And I had explained that this family was being sensitive AND my daughter could not have stayed at that hospital alone. They would not have taken care of her. Not only were we there just to encourage her but we were her nurses. We had to learn to turn off all of the machines and turn them on again when my daughter went to the bathroom ( the bathroom was no easy feat…with the tube coming out of her back and of course her arms and having to measure BOTH outputs); we had to make sure someone would come to help her when the call buttons were not working. We had to get her moved to another room because the noise from construction was so bad that anybody, even if they didn’t have a HEADACHE, would have gotten sick from it! We had to measure her urine output from her bladder as well as her nephrostomy(SP?) tube because they were never around to do it. I can go on and on….but I will not. I think I have made my point.

This hospital stay was terrible and as far as I am concerned they gave substandard care. I have seen documentaries about hospitals in 3rd world countries where the families have to stay 24/7 to give nursing care or they will not be taken care of, that is how this felt.

I can say that if my daughter had not resolved her headache and fever when she did I was going to ask for her to be transferred either to another hospital or to a different floor. Maybe on the Labor and Delivery floor they just do not handle illness as well as baby delivery!? I do not know but when the time came to deliver the baby it was like night and day! That morning her nurse almost never left her side and when she did other nurses were available. They were so attentive!!! Like night and day!

We still worry about our grandson though, why? Because my daughter was left for so long with a high fever, how does this affect a baby in utero? There was so much stress and we saw it on the monitors. Even if they did turn the volume down!

After having said all of this I need to make a couple of acknowledgments. I need to say that when they were delivering the baby they were like a well oiled machine. It was amazing the way they worked together. As jaded as I am against that hospital I could recognize that the nurses and the midwife did an excellent job with my daughter and grandson. I thought we were going to lose them both this last week at various times, this was a emotionally hard week. We got through it and everyone is OK. I am thankful for that. At any rate, there was a point where the midwife had to call for a specialist NICU nurse to come running for what might be impending trouble, and that nurse came RUNNING!!! They were good, they were organized, and they did an excellent job. And for that I want to thank them all.

Also, acknowledge a nurse who really did take care of my daughter while she was in hospital. This nurse was the one that put the original IV in, as such we were a little worried about the care my daughter would get from her, but she was fantastic with my daughter. One of the nights, as my daughter was getting much better, she helped her get a shower, she took care of her throughout the shower and then she sat and brushed her hair out and braided it. She showed my daughter kindness. I want to thank her for that. I know everyone can have a bad day, and apparently she did, but in a hospital setting there is no room for mistakes. And that we have to recognize.

Also, the ladies that do the massage therapy in the hospital are awesome! You guys were great and most appreciated. Thank you.

That about wraps up our experience with HRH, let me say that we have delivered 4 babies there and have NEVER had such a horrible experience. I pray that this is an exception to the norm, for all of the other patients out there.

Although, it makes me pause to consider the fact that we have never had a problem before, but my daughter was never admitted to this hospital sick in the past, or in need of care other then pregnancy related issues. Maybe it is time to take a closer look at this hospital and the care it gives to our community. There is more to hospital care then delivering babies!

I will finish by saying that we should NOT have let this go on as long as it did. We should have insisted on a REAL Dr. to see my daughter. We should have insisted on the nurses actually keeping track of everything and helping out. This is so sad. When I think of the pain, the terrible pain my daughter was in and think that she was pregnant and the baby was going through all of this too! All of the radiation from all of the tests, all of the high fevers and the terrible pain and the lack of eating. It is no wonder his delivery was so bad. We should not have let this happen. Why do we feel like we have to just do what they tell us to when in hospital? Like we do not have a voice? We DO have a voice and we need to use it. If you think you are receiving bad care or are being neglected at a hospital ASK for a second opinion, a new nurse…whatever! Just do something!