Rule of Thumb: Never Go Into the Hospital

My mother had a brain tumour, but it was a case of H. influenzae that she picked up while at the hospital that pushed her over the edge and led indirectly to her death. At the same time everybody else in my family picked up that same infection of H. influenzae. It made my brother and I sick but we recovered. My father was hospitalized with it and I suspect, like my mother, this infection pushed him over the edge because he died a few weeks later.

Here's Maureen Dowd with her own story of hospital-acquired illness. From an op-ed in the NY Times:

When my brother went into the hospital with pneumonia, he quickly contracted four other infections in the intensive care unit.

Anguished, I asked a young doctor why this was happening. Wearing a white lab coat and blue tie, he did a show-and-tell. He leaned over Michael and let his tie brush my sedated brother’s hospital gown.

“It could be anything,” he said. “It could be my tie spreading germs.”

I was dumbfounded. “Then why do you wear a tie?” I asked. He shrugged and left for rounds.

Michael died in that I.C.U. A couple years later, I read reports about how neckties and lab coats worn by doctors and clinical workers were suspected as carriers of deadly germs. Infections kill 100,000 patients in hospitals and other clinics in the U.S. every year.

Most experts will tell you that diseases in hospitals are carried from room to room by nurses, doctors, and other staff. The simple remedy: wash your hands. But most don't. This reminds me of the earliest lesson in hospital-acquired disease: Ignaz Semmelweis showed that women giving birth were dying of puerperal fever because of germs carried by doctors. This was in the 1840s. That was over 170 years ago. But doctors and medical staff continue to ignore basic sanitary precautions and kill their patients!

Patients are the victim of this system:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that health care workers, even doctors and nurses, have a “poor” record of obeying hand-washing rules.

A report in the April issue of Health Affairs indicated that one out of every three people suffer a mistake during a hospital stay.

I saw infractions of the rules in the I.C.U. where Michael died, but I never called out anyone. I was too busy trying to ingratiate myself with the doctors, nurses and orderlies, irrationally hoping that they’d treat my brother better if they liked us.

So the basic lesson to be learned: never go into a hospital unless you are already on death's door. It shouldn't be this way, but hospitals and medical staff have shown themselves to be impervious to simple education about basic sanitary measures for over 170 years. They won't change in what is left of my life. Instead, they will continue killing patients while going about the great drama of "saving lives". It is just like the insanity of pre-modern medicine where doctors made a great show of bleeding patients, killing many, in the name of "curing" them. Tragic.